LiveCD - Ubuntu Breezy 5.1

[SimpleSi]

I use a portable harddrive to copy Ghost images when setting up new machines and tried using the Ubuntu 5.1 LiveCd instead of Knoppix as Knoppix was hanging at the requesting a DHCP address stage (Fujitsu AMILO laptops for info)

Although is asks a few questions (whereas Knoppix just boots) it was really nice to use.

The GParted tool let me wipe the existing partitions and create new ones and then the Disk manager let me format and mount them with no hassle and the OS used 2.0 drivers to access my USB Hard Drive and took 3 minutes to copy across my 2*2G images.

Very nice.

regards

Simon

[richard]

I've been using linux for a while and have never really sused doing that out. Any chance of a HOW-TO?

[russdev]

@SimpleSi please do add it to the wiki

russ

[CyberNerd]

You got me thinking...

Assuming you've got PXE network cards you could boot the machine from the network and image direct from the network - save carrying a USB drive/CDrom.
I never tried that but I have got a classroom of thinclients booting 10MB linux images off the network. theres no reason why they couldn't include parted or some other imaging tool.

Infact with a correct DHCP/cron setup you could probably script it and do it from the comfort of your desk/bed.

Might take a while to do a large image though!

links I just found on this theme:
http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~greg/ghost4linux/
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/#netboot
http://www.thinstation.org/
http://freshmeat.net/projects/g4l/

just an idea!

[linuxgirlie]

I use Ghost 4 Linux (see link in above post) it's really good and the guy who writes it is really friendly

We also use it with our OS deployment in Karoshi.

Jo

[SimpleSi]

Sorry for delay - it all went Pete Tong on my 6th machine.

Just to fully let you know what I was doing - I was using the LiveCD to do set up 2 partitions and then copying a Ghost image from my USB hard drive to 2nd partition and re-booting with a Ghost floppy disc and doing a normal main partition restore. (using the LiveCD as it has USB 2.0 drivers and does the job in 3 minutes)

Anyway back to the nightmare.
On machine 6, Gparted seemed to set the partitions fine - I then copied the Ghost image onto 2nd partition - rebooted from Ghost flopy and it couldn't see any hard drives.

Went back into LiveCD, seemed all OK in Gparted, tried running cfdisk from a console window and I get a message saying "No hard drives on this computer mate (to paraphrase)"

Try re-partitioning and copying image from USB drive to 2nd part (this seems to work fine BTW) - same result.

I ended up using a Win98 boot floppy and using DOS fdisk to wipe and start again - I fully formatted the partitions just to make sure and it worked OK.

Since then head has bought 2 more laptops (slighty different model) so having setup the 1st machine and created a Ghost Image - when I tried Gparted and the copying technique - same result - Ghost says "What hard drive???" - cfdisk in Linux says "What hard drive" - the disc tool in Puppy Linux (A simple toy to play with - especially the one that runs within XP using Qemu) - puppy says "What hard drive".

Only the Ubuntu LiveCD disk manager tools says - yeah - disc there what to do want to do with it.

SO I don't know how or why GParted seems to mess the disc up but it does.

When I've got some time at that school - I'm going to try wiping and starting again to see if I can isolate the problem

regards

Simon

[SimpleSi]

Tried playing on a standard desktop and ended up up the swannee again and needed to use FDISK from DOS to get back to square one.

I can understand that resizing DOS partitions could be difficult from Linux but I don't understand why wiping a disc and creating 2 FAT32 partitions is so flaky (but it seems it is).

Even the manual for cfdisk says don't do it

Never mind

regards

Simon

[webman]

Well it is an MS filesystem :x

[Geoff]

You can certainly create the partitions ok. But generally you need to use the msdos format command to format the partitions sucessfully.

On older machines you need to be careful with Cynlider limits too.