Installation method; copying all files from HDD to another computer?
 

Good evening,

I was wondering if it is possible to compress an entire system, move it to another computer, and extract it there, use a live cd to install GRUB2 and have it function fully?

I have made a lot of modifications to a fresh Ubuntu 10.04 server setup, including installing a DM etc, but I find that remastersys is a little bit buggy for my intentions (and has a lot of dependencies that I DON'T need that are then included in the install - gdm is one example)

What I want to be able to do is copy my existing setup directly to other computers of similar specs (no special hardware like wlan or anything) via DVD. The dvd could possibly include a small live-cd that I can put a script into to extract all files to the correct places and install GRUB.

Before I waste my time, is this possible, or is it going to cause too much of a headache on the other computer?

The hostname, usernames, passwords etc are all supposed to be the same, so this isn't a concern - none of these will have net access.

Thanks,
Joe

Hello,

Have you thought about using dd? For a reference, examples, etc... - http://www.marksanborn.net/howto/mak...drive-with-dd/

Cheers,

Josh

This looks like it is exactly what I am looking for, but I'm going to first test it with two vbox VMs.

Will post back if it works and mark as solved then.

Cheers, Joe

Sounds good.... Let me know how everything goes man.

Josh

This seems to have worked, using a fresh image of Ubuntu Server 10.04 on VirtualBox. However, I did have to reinstall GRUB2 to get it to work.

Thanks a lot Josh,

Joe

Marking thread as solved.