parted question
 

Ok here is my scenario

At my company we have our own linux distro that we preinstall on the computers we sell. I have been put in charge of making the installation easier.

The way it worked before I took over is you would put the harddrive in a machine that already had 2 hardrives. 1 boot and the other is the image. it would dd the contents of the image drive to the new one and then run parted to resize the drive. we have 4 sizes of drives 20, 40, 60, and 80. it had a separate script for each one.

Now here is how i have changed it. I wrote a script that uses /proc/ide/hdc/geometry to see what size the drive is and then use the appropriate script. made things much easier. then they decided they wanted to do a multi-cast duplication after the machines are all put together. ok i tweaked UDPCast to meet our needs and used it.

The problem is UDPCast takes forever on a 20 gig so a 80 would take several hours. They want to only transfer the 6 gig partition that we actually use and then run the parted scripts again to resize.

My though was to make a customized knoppix disk and have it do the auto sense thing and resize the partition for me. well it doesn't work. I put the script in /etc/rc3.d (after changing the default runlevel to 3) and it doesn't run at boot up like it is supposed to according to the documentation. plus when i try to run the script just from a command prompt it tells me that hda2 is in use. how can this be?

Anyone have any ideas how I can make this work or a good alternative. It has to be something that you just pop the cd in and it does it's thing. no user intervention.


thanks

Your best bet is probably to use partimage.
1) Get a minimalist distro
2) Install partimage
3) Use partimage to copy the partitions on your preconfigured drive
4) Remove the preconfigured drive and replace with a blank one
5) Create the partitions
6) Run partimage to copy the partitions back

Once this is done once you only need steps 5 & 6 and these could probably be handled by a seperate script so you only have to boot and type:
makemealinuxcomputernow

or:
go

for short ;)

Thanks man I will look at doing that.