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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 DEBIAN

lm-profiler.conf

LM-PROFILER.CONF(8)					      System Manager's Manual					       LM-PROFILER.CONF(8)

NAME

       /etc/laptop-mode/lm-profiler.conf - Configuration file for lm-profiler, a profiler for laptop-mode-tools.

DESCRIPTION

       This  manual  page documents the options that can be set in the /etc/laptop-mode/lm-profiler.conf configuration file.  For a description of
       what lm-profiler does, see the lm-profiler(8) manpage.

SETTINGS

       The syntax of options is OPTION=value.

       The following settings are available in lm-profiler.conf:

       VERBOSE_OUTPUT
		 Set this to 1 if you want to see a lot of output when you run lm-profiler, and 0 if you don't want  this.  Useful  for  debugging
		 purposes. (Currently does nothing.)

       PROFILE_RUN_LENGTH
		 The length of a profiling run, in seconds. This should be a while, so that lm-profiler can gather enough information. The default
		 is 10 minutes (600 seconds).

       ACTIVITY_INTERVAL_MIN

       ACTIVITY_INTERVAL_MAX
		 The behaviour that you want to avoid when you have your hard drive spun down, is disk accesses that are  spread  out  over  time,
		 because  your	hard  drive will have to spin up for each access. lm-profiler detects when applications perform disk accesses that
		 are at least some time apart (otherwise they can be considered part of the same access) but not TOO far apart (otherwise they are
		 no problem). These settings configure what lm-profiler considers "at least some time apart" and "too far apart", respectively, in
		 seconds.

       RECOMMEND_DEFAULT_SERVICES

       DEFAULT_SERVICES
		 If RECOMMEND_DEFAULT_SERVICES is set to 1 (enabled), then lm-profiler will always suggest turning  off  the  services	listed	in
		 DEFAULT_SERVICES (separated by spaces).

       IGNORE_PROGRAMS
		 Programs listed in this option, separated by spaces, will be ignored for disk activity profiling. The default settings (which can
		 be referenced as $DEF_IGNORE_PROGRAMS) include common utility programs and all programs used by lm-profiler itself.

       RECOMMEND_NETWORK_SERVICES
		 When this option is enabled (value 1), lm-profiler will detect any services that are listening on network ports, and it will sug-
		 gest that you disable them.

       IGNORE_NETWORK_SERVICES
		 Services  listed  in  this  configuration option (separated by spaces) are not suggested as a network service by lm-profiler. The
		 default values can be accessed as $DEF_IGNORE_NETWORK_SERVICES.

SEE ALSO

       lm-profiler(8).

       laptop_mode(8).

       laptop-mode.conf(8).

AUTHOR

       This manual page was written by Bart Samwel (bart@samwel.tk). Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this  document  under
       the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

															       LM-PROFILER.CONF(8)
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