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Full Discussion: Automated disk cloning
Special Forums Hardware Filesystems, Disks and Memory Automated disk cloning Post 302378149 by uvaio on Monday 7th of December 2009 04:34:00 AM
Old 12-07-2009
Automated disk cloning
Hi,

I'm running Ubuntu on my laptop. To keep my data safe and easy disaster recovery as well I bought similar HDD to one installed in my laptop with higher capacity and using USB box I'm doing disk clone to it. So at any time I can replace disk and carry on with my work as before.

I'm trying to simplify this, automate it. My goal is:
1. plug external USB disk and boot from it
2. "one click" action to execute cloning, let it work.
3. when done, unplug disk and reboot as normal.

I don't want to look for live CDs or use USB key linux installations to do this job everytime, I just want something that will reside on the same external disk, will boot up and do its job.

I tried something like this on virtual machine:
disk A: 300 MB disk, one primary partition, linux installation (DSL) (grub)
disk B: 1GB, actuall back up disk (USB)

I have created primary partition 4 on disk B of size 300MB at the end of the drive. Installed GRML linux on it and Grub as a boot manager. This is suppose to be backu up performing OS.

I've created shell script which does this:
1. backup MBR of disk B
Code:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=bMBR bs=512 count=1

2. backup MBR of disk A
Code:
dd if=/dev/sda of=aMBR bs=512 count=1

3. clone disk A to disk B from possition 0
Code:
dd_rescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb

4. restore disk B MBR so it can be used to backup next time again
Code:
dd of=/dev/sdb if=bMBR bs=512 count=1

when I wanted to use disk B as regular disk I copied back MBR of disk A.
Code:
dd of=/dev/sdb if=aMBR bs=512 count=1

and it shoudl boot up from disk B as it would from disk A, disk B should be regular clone of disk A.

I didn't get expected results.
In first case when disk B should have its original MBR, after cloning it does hang at boot time with black screen and GRUB written on top.
If I copy MBR of disk A to disk B and try to boot from disk B, boot manager seem to be ok but I get kernel panic message from DSL linux with no more info.

I'm not an expert in this field I just wanted to confirm with more experienced users whether I'm just missing something or going completely wrong route. So I won't spend ages of trying to fix something that can't work this way.

Is there anyone who can direct me or give me some clues?

Thanks
 

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LEARN ABOUT NETBSD

mbrlabel

MBRLABEL(8)						    BSD System Manager's Manual 					       MBRLABEL(8)

NAME

     mbrlabel -- update disk label from MBR label(s)

SYNOPSIS

     mbrlabel [-fqrw] [-s sector] device

DESCRIPTION

     mbrlabel is used to update a NetBSD disk label from the Master Boot Record (MBR) label(s) found on disks that were previously used on
     DOS/Windows systems (or other MBR using systems).

     mbrlabel scans the MBR contained in the very first block of the disk (or the block specified through the -s flag), then walks through every
     extended partition found and generates additional partition entries for the disk from the MBRs found in those extended partitions.

     Each MBR partition which does not have an equivalent partition in the disk label (equivalent in having the same size and offset) is added to
     the first free partition slot in the disk label.  A free partition slot is defined as one with an fstype of 'unused' and a size of zero
     ('0').  If there are not enough free slots in the disk label, a warning will be issued.

     The raw partition (typically partition c, but d on i386 and some other platforms) is left alone during this process.

     By default, the proposed changed disk label will be displayed and no disk label update will occur.

     Available options:

     -f 	Force an update, even if there has been no change.

     -q 	Performs operations in a quiet fashion.

     -r 	In conjunction with -w, also update the on-disk label.

     -s sector	Specifies the logical sector number that has to be read from the disk in order to find the MBR.  Useful if the disk has remapping
		drivers on it and the MBR is located in a non-standard place.  Defaults to 0.

     -w 	Update the in-core label if it has been changed.  See also -r.

SEE ALSO

     disklabel(8), dkctl(8), fdisk(8), mbr(8)

HISTORY

     The mbrlabel command appeared in NetBSD 1.4.

BSD
								   April 5, 2010							       BSD
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