Cloning a Gentoo system

[znmeb]

I have a Gentoo system that's built with all the default i686 packages. I'd like to "clone" this system to other i686 systems. What's the easiest way to do this? I don't want to recompile anything; I simply want to repartition the target disks and load compiled code. Then I'll be able to update the two systems individually.

Ed Borasky
http://algocompsynth.com

[Catach]

well, you could partition your new disk and then do a straight binary copy:

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cp -a /usr /root /bin /sbin ... /mnt/newdisk

Or you could make binary packages of all the things you've installed on the first machine using the 'quickpkg' tool (I think it's part of the gentoolkit package), copy these packages across to the new computer and recompile everything using these packages. It's probably a good idea to copy all the source from the first computer as well just in case a package or two is corrupted or wont work.

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emerge -Duk <everything>

[swingarm]

Partimage. If you want to resize the partitions I suggest a program called qtparted on the SystemrescueCD(Gentoo based).

[ectospasm]

This is how I would do it, but unfortunately I don't have a second disk to test this out on:

1. Install the (preferrably identical) harddrive for the clone in the machine that already has Linux installed and configured how you want it.
2. Partition this drive using fdisk or cfdisk, the same way that the HD you want to clone is partitioned.
3. Mount /boot if it is not already mounted.
4. Mount / and /boot partitions of the clone drive (on say, /mnt/clone/ and /mnt/clone/boot
5. Copy everything from / to /mnt/clone/ using the following commands:

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   # cd / 
   # cp -avx /  /mnt/clone
   

6. Copy eveything from /boot to /mnt/clone/boot using the following commands:

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   # cd /boot
   # cp -avx /boot /mnt/clone/boot/
   

7. You should chroot into this new drive, so we can make sure that your bootloader is installed. Do it just like in the Install Docs:

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   # chroot /bin/bash /mnt/clone/
   # env-update
   # . /etc/profile
   

8. Install your bootloader of choice, making sure that it installs itself on /dev/hdx (whatever the clone drive happens to be). Look in the install docs for this.
9. Exit the chroot, and shutdown your machine to disconnect the clone HD.
10. Install the clone HD into the clone machine, and boot and see if it works!

The cp options above tell cp to archive (-a), to be verbose (-v), and to only recurse in the current filesystem (-x). The archive command preserves symbolic links (so they refer to files in the clone filesystem, not the original filesystem), copies the source directory recursively, and preserves file permissions, owner, groups, setuid, setgid, and timestamps

Again, I want to stress that this is completely off the top of my head, and is something you only want to do once, or at most infrequently. You could probably use the dump command, but I'm not really familiar with it.