Cloning Linux OS
 

How do i clone over Linux OS into an image file while the Eee PC is offline?

Thinking of installing Win XP and later on if need be, clone back the Linux into the system.

Is it possible in the 1st place?

Kindly reccommend any solutions...thanks in advance.

k|d_r|zal

You image a drive in linux with the dd command. I don't know what you mean by "offline". You need read access to the drive to image it, and someplace to put the image. To restore the image, reverse the dd process - you will also need to restore grub.

Have a look at:
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/

Thanks for the tip, Sir.

If its not too much to ask, can someone give me the dd commend for this? and also the reverse dd command as well.

Thanks again.

Sorry newbie here.

You can try the clonezilla http://www.clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/. You should have enough memory to hold your entire harddisk. The storage location can be a usb drive, external harddrive, network share. You can get to know more on the site.

Other good imaging programs are Partimage and Ghost4Linux..but i usuallly use Clonezilla and suggest you to use it

Good Luck !

Let us know how it goes !

partimage
Ghost4Linux
Clonezilla

These tools are intended for large scale cloning in commercial environments. Their main advantage is that they only clone the used part of the drive (and ability to re-image drives across a network... OK: their two main advantages are image size, network savvy, and they look cool... three... OK - their many advantages include ... ... I'll start again!)

Anyway - dd will copy every byte, including the zeros - so the image size will be the same size as your disk. Which on the Eee is what? 4 gig?

You will be erasing the main linux install after imaging - and the image restoring programs along with it. You will need to install linux to an external drive, so the Eee can boot off it when you want linux back. (Though this is a way to have dual boot.)

If you have a usb optical drive, a live disk is doable. What's important is that the Eee drive partitions are not mounted when you image the drive.

Assuming that the Eee internal drive is /dev/sda and the storage drive partition is /dev/sde5 then (and it is formatted with a filesystem which can handle 4GiB files) then:

mount /dev/sde5 /media/usbdrive
dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/usbdrive/eee.img

Of course you modify this for your situation. Read the dd manpage for other options to refine this. Many people also want to specify the block size.

If your storage media is the same drive you booted from, then you don't need the mount part.

To put the image back, you reverse the order of the if= and of= arguments

dd if=/media/usbdrive/eee.img of=/dev/sda

You'll need to do a grubinstall if you installed windows.
That wiki site I linked to has a lot of insight into the Eee - make sure you are familiar with how it is designed to work before fiddling.

If you have more that 4 gig it that thing, well done, you should stick the dd through the tar or gzip archiver.

If you stuff up, then you can always just install a full linux. Have fun.

Hey everyone,

Thanks for all the input. Yupz, the eeePC only has 4GB. Will try out the clonezilla 1st and update if i can get it to work.

Thanks again to all.