Please, Please,Please help with HD Cloning...
 

I have a lab with several Identical computers. I installed and configured 1 computer and set everything just the way I wanted. My plan was to clone it to the rest of the HD's using Norton Ghost and then change the hostname and ethernet adapter info and start using them. The clone seemed to go ok (fast if nothing else). When I installed the hard drives into the other computers and booted them up all seemed fine. I started to change the hostname and ip info, but it didn't work. The hostname would not change. It kept reverting back to the name of the source drive. I ended up su'ing and changin it in /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname. This seemed to work on a few of them but not on others. The prompt in terminal still shows admin@WS6 (which is the hostname of the source drive I used for cloning) even though /etc/hostname shows WS3 and similar is true for /etc/hosts.

The other major problem I am having is that on a few of the computers, I cannot seem to get the network to ... well, work. I have Linksys wireless routers and nic's. I have the settings set identically and the network is working on one machine but not another. I have checked the routing table and the routes are identical and the ip config on the cards is identical.

Another strange (not life threatening) problem is that the wireless adapters on the source drive were labeled ra0 and ra1. When I cloned the drive, then adapters are labeled ra2 and ra3. What is up with that?

Many peopel on #linuxhelp and #ubuntu have given suggestions about which program to use to clone. I have used ghost in the past (last year) and it worked fine. I was able to change what I needed to change and all worked ok.

I read about several programs (dd, g4u, g4l, and others), but have had some glitch with them as well. My HD's are SATA and that seems to have caused me some problems itself (some programs not recognizing the drive when I boot from the cd. Can't clone a drive I can't see.)

Please, please, please somebody help me. I need to get my classroom up and running asap.

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Mike

try using kickstart method, that way you wouldnt face much difficulty in setting up all this.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ki...tCompatibility

dd clones hard disk partitions in linux as well as many other things. It's a low level bit for bit copier. Search this forum for the guide on using dd. I think the author is AwesomeMonster.

The hostname setting can be in various places depending on your distro. What distro are you using?

A fairly thorough way to find where the hostname is in your config files is this:

It may or may not be a good idea to modify all the file you find manually. I'm not sure.

The network adapters, while they may be the same model, will not have exactly the same MAC address (and they should not!). The change is likely due to that. On Ubuntu, the MAC addresses of network devices is stored in /etc/iftab (this may or may not be the same in other distros!). I would imagine getting rid of this file and then doing network configuration again would help:

(then run the network configuration again).

Still trying to create HD Image...
 

Thanks to all that have posted. I have looked at kickstart and do not understand what preseeding is all about. I have tried to use dd, but when I boot from the live CD, I only see one of the SATA drives so that does not work. I have tried to use G4U, but the wireless network connection keeps failing during the upload (at different points). Sometimes it comes back up and continues, but eventually it times out and fails. I have tried to use Norton Ghost 2003 and that is what started this mess. I have used Ghost 2003 in the past and it worked flawlessly. I am beginning to wonder if there is something in the latest release of Ubuntu that is causing the problem. I tried to remove the iftab file and recreate, but no luck. The iftab file shows the 2 wireless network adapters as ra0 and ra1, however, they show in netowork-admin as ra2 and ra3. Besides that I am unable to get 2 computers to talk to the network. I teach Cisco Networking, so I know the ip address and netmask etc. are all correct, but they just do not communicate with the router. I cannot get G4U to use the built in ethernet adapter. I think it does not like the vendor. I do not know what to do now. I do not wish to spend the 2-3 days per machine to install and configure everything. I am not sure I remember everything I did to set it up.

On a side note, does it matter if I have the network adapters turned on and working before the image? Also, I am using nis as a way to create accounts on a server so they can switch computers if necessary and still access their documents. Could this cause problems?

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Mike

Maybe the kernel isn't loading the correct modules for the hardware (or it isn't supported).

you could find out what modules are required for each nic and run on the machines. Ubuntu does have great HW detection though (from my experience)

Thanks. The computers all have identical hardware with one exception. 2 Machines have an additional firewire card. Other than that, they are identical.

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Mike

If you have some funky hardware, try Suse. If you have some old hardware, try syslinux.