I am looking for best way to clone a system. I have well setup Ubuntu6.06 server which I want to clone to several other PCs. The other PCs will have various size harddisks, I can install all the harddisks to be hda.

The target is to have same partitions and LVM2 systems in all PCs.

I could do dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda ( target installed to USB of my source bserver ), but some of the target disks are smaller than the source disk and also using dd is overkill because there is only couple of GB actual data and dd copies whole 250GB disk.

sysresccd might be suitable for the job, but I can not access sysresccd.org website? Also partimage could do the job but can not access that website either? Are they up to date? Systemimager looks good but a little bit too powerfull tool for this. It seems to need own separate server?

How to copy partition structure ( hda hda1 LVM2 etc ) to other disk?
How to copy the boot setup ( MBR, grub setup etc ) to other disk?

If I can get those previous two steps done I can just copy directories and files to the other disks.

I'm not sure about the actual cloning of the disk... With identical drives in all machines it's simple using dd, but with different drive types I don't know.

What I wanted to say was that there will probably be some post-clone configuration to do: don't forget to set up the hostnames, and you may end up with a little weirdness with the network config with unexpected interface names. There was a post a week or two ago which mentioned it. Anyone have a link?

There is commercial software called "Migrate Easy": http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing...s/migrateeasy/

You create a bootable CD that can be used on any PC. The software allows you to resize individual partitions when copying disks and handle different sizes for source and destination disks. I've used it a lot myself. It is designed to ease the process of upgrading a hard disk. Using disk cloning to install linux on multiple PCs is another story though. As the previous poster said, it will cause problems unless hardware is identical on the two machines, because all the existing configuration stuff will be copied.