[ale] dd for 'ghosting' ?

[Gary Maltzen]

The problem with the 'dd' solution is that the restore drive must have the same geometry as the original image drive; the partition boot sector contains drive geometry (cylinders, heads, sectors) information.

(The following *untested* idea comes to mind).

I wonder if good-old 'dump' and 'restore' would work on a VFAT partition???

You could dump to and restore from an unformatted partition (in lieu of a tape drive). IIRC, restore even works over-the-wire.

You'd have to do something special to preserve the MBR and PBR.

All you should need is something like Tom's Root/Boot floppy.

>Does anyone have a solution for this?  We are trying to fight a 'ghost' licensing fee issue for each of our 4000 PC's. (You can imagine the cost for all those licenses!)
>
>desired result: Be able to re-image a local fat32 partition from an image of that partition stored on a linux partition.  Idea so far:
>Mount an nfs partition and do a dd from there.  But is dd capable of copying over a fat32 partition from a linux/nfs file system? And How would I be able to create an image of a fat 32 partition to do this with?  Would it have to be an iso?  Another idea is to have a linux partition on each machine with a stored copy of the fat32 partition.  And basically doing the same thing but removing the NFS part of it.
>If we do this though, we will need a way to 'update' the image on the local linux partition when we want to make a change.

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