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I need to duplicate CentOS hard drive image for multiple stations. The HD has the following layout:

Disk /dev/sdb: 250GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End    Size   Type     File system  Flags
 1      32.3kB  107MB  107MB  primary  ext3         boot
 2      107MB   250GB  250GB  primary               lvm

I saved /dev/sdb1 to file with fsarchiver but for sdb2 I get:

/fsarchiver savefs an2.fsa /dev/sdb2
oper_save.c#1006,filesystem_mount_partition(): can't detect and mount filesystem of partition [/dev/sdb2], cannot continue.
removed an2.fsa

Although fsarchiver probe simple correctly detects sdb2 as LVM2_member. Is fsarchiver correct tool for this job? What's wrong?

I'm on Ubuntu 9.1 with fsarchiver 0.6.8 and lvm tools installed.

Thanks.

jackhab
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1 Answers1

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a normal tar backup/restore can do the job for you, and if the disk layout is to be the same on all machines, simply use dd (or derived toos, like g4u, clonezilla etc...)

dyasny
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  • Can you be more specific? How can I create and image file from LVM partition and how do I deploy it on a different hard drive? – jackhab Mar 22 '10 at 15:00
  • well, if the drives are the same size, there's no need to even look at LVM - just connect the source and destination drives in the same machine, boot from a liveCD and run dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb This should work for dest. drives of the same size as src, and larger. dd doesn't care what FS you have, it will copy everything on the block level – dyasny Mar 22 '10 at 15:09
  • I don't want to keep a source drive. I want to create LiveCD which will deploy from the image file. Besides dd is slow since it copies everything including empty blocks. – jackhab Mar 22 '10 at 15:17
  • I thought you wanted to duplicate HDDs, not create a deployment LiveCD. With CloneZilla (or if you paid for ghost/acronis) you can image the drive into an image on an FTP server, from which you can later on deploy. With g4u, the imaging is done via dd, so afaic, there isn't zero de-dup in the process. I might be wrong - haven't touched g4u in a couple of years – dyasny Mar 22 '10 at 16:33