Hello!

I'm wondering if I could possibly get some information regarding the dd tool.

I've recently been tasked with a new member of my workplace providing me an external drive with a "clone" of their previous computer.

Their expectation is that I will be able to restore this disk image to a new computer that was built for them because they could not take their previous machine.

Fist off, I'm a linux noob (I'm more of a Windows and Mac OS guy, along with hardware) but I've got a supportive manager who always helps when needed

I've been provided a 75GB folder with 27 image files (Computer-160GB.iso.gz.aa-av) and a text file named "disk information" with the following.

> fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xbbdfbbdf

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 6079 48829536 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 6080 12198 49150867+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 * 12199 18705 52267477+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4 18706 19457 6040409+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 18706 19457 6040408+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris


From looking around, it seems there's a bit of a task in restoration (probably due to my unfamiliarity) but I haven't seen if I can unzip with ISO image and then somehow restore it to the new drive (which is a RAID 5 Array)

Am I looking at spending a lot of time for no success or do I just need to be pointed in the right direction?

Thanks much!

Why not? Seems reasonable. The "aa-av" part suggests it's been split with the 'split' utility ('man split' for more). Just try it and you should have confirmation the CDROMs weren't burned with some proprietary application and the disk image is intact by loop-mounting it afterwards ('man losetup' for more).

Sorry, I should say my expectation would be to extract the zipped/split files into a single 160GB ISO image.

From there, I'm lost on what to do, and I haven't found any information on taking an .ISO and recovering the disk image made. I'm correct in thinking I have to identically partition the new drive before recovery? (if I'm wrong, you'll see how list I am)

Obviously this is out of my realm and the sad thing is the person who created this doesn't know how to preform the recovery part.

It would have been easier to have a disk image I could ghost with some kind of GUI :P

I get the feeling they used clonezilla to make this image.

I think the iso part is misleading.

You'll have to find out what the ISO contains. (And do note working with personal computers or finding out what SW was used to create the ISO doesn't require "feeling".) There's standard ISO tools on Linux allowing you create directory listings of ISO contents. Regardless of what the the ISO contains (a 'dd' single or several disk images, file system contents or something proprietary) you have to create the RAID5 array. If the ISO contains an OS you should check if you need a disk to boot from or if the OS can boot from RAID5.

"(Computer-160GB.iso.gz.aa-av"

That iso was named poorly. I think the name should have been some name.img or such instead of name.iso.

The parts aa to av suggest to me that clonezilla or some part of was the tool used to clone the drive. Forget the iso part.

Yeah, my understanding is an ISO of the entire drive was made, but then was split into DVD sized volumes. all using this dd command.

I talked with my 'customer' yesterday and told him I've got no experience with this stuff but he claims it to be incredibly easy.

"You just boot from a linux CD, I have Kubuntu and then you just run the reverse command"

Whatever that means..... either way, he's coming by to do it himself.. I'm not paid to do this, just to build the computer

We shall see what happens

I'd boot to clonezilla.

Well normally, yes, in a sense you simply use any live distro and type

dd if=/file.iso of=/dev/sda bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

sda being the actual drive. It can be sdb or sdc.

But Im not sure on the RAID5 aspect.

RAID uses other device names but with respect to using 'dd' /dev/md0 is as much a block device as your average SCSI(-like) target.

so here's the command he punched in

the RAID volume shows up as /dev/sda so that's nice.

cat Filename.iso.gz.* | gzip -d | dd of=dev/sda

Supposedly this will extract the disk image and copy the data onto the new drive. Supposedly copying over partitions and boot sectors I guess...

We'll see in the morning if it even worked.

What that doesn't take into account is disk sizes. If his old disk was bigger than the current disk then it will fail, if the new disk is bigger than the old disk then he will have space that's unallocated. It's doable but there are better ways of doing it such as using clonezilla.

So it all worked!

Obviously it only brought back the original 160GB partitioned, and I want nothing to do with rezising partitions so that's his problem (my boss is already saying I've spent too much time on it)

There's also a Windows XP install that I sadly can't repair, so we either do a fresh install or forget it. Luckily I found I can do a fresh install on the old XP partition, then use rescatux to restore the GRUB boot loader (XP after Linux and it overwrites the boot sector and all...)

Hopefully this thing will finally be off the workbench today... then he wants two more identical machines that have similar restorations to have done.