[Soekris] Cloning a bootable CF

[Stephen Melvin]

I've done this a few times on FreeBSD when CF sizes don't match and have 
found the
following sequence to work swimmingly:

Assumes you have another FreeBSD system that has a CF card reader and enough
disk space to store a memory image of the new CF card.  First find out 
the exact size
of the new card (assume card installed on /dev/ad10)

    bsdlabel -Awn ad10

Look for the "sectors/unit" number.  This number may also show up in the
/var/log/messages file when you first plug in the card.

Now create a memory image of a blank bootable file system with this exact
number of sectors:

    1. create block of zeros: dd if=/dev/zero of=disk_image.bin bs=512 
count=<sectors/unit>
    2. create vnode: mdconfig -f disk_image.bin -u 0
    3. create boot sectors: bsdlabel -Bw md0 auto
    4. create partitions: bsdlabel -e md0
    5. create file system: newfs -b 8192 -f 1024 -U /dev/md0a
    6. mount image: mount /dev/md0a /mnt2

Now mount the old card and copy the files over:

    1. mount old card: mount /dev/ad10a /mnt
    2. copy files: ( cd /mnt ; tar cPf - . ) | ( cd /mnt2 ; tar xf - ) ;
    3. unmount: umount /mnt2
    4. detach: mdconfig -d -u 0
    5. unmount: umount /mnt
 
The mounting and copying steps may depend on how you have partitioned 
the old
card.  Now you have a new bootable memory image and you can just 
transfer it to the
new card:

    1. install new card in /dev/ad10
    2. dd if=disk_image.bin of=/dev/ad10

Your mileage may vary.  Hope this helps.  Regards,

Steve



Bill Maas wrote:
> Hi Marco,
>
> On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 10:17 -0600, Darrick Hartman wrote:
>   
>> Marco A. Calamari wrote:
>>     
>>> On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 06:40 -0600, Darrick Hartman wrote:
>>>       
>>>> Marco A. Calamari wrote:
>>>>         
>>>>> On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 10:51 +0100, Flemming Jacobsen wrote:
>>>>>           
>>>>>> Hey
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Why don't you just clone it using dd:
>>>>>>   Insert old card
>>>>>>     dd if=/dev/DEVICE of=/tmp/soekris.image bs=64k
>>>>>>   Insert new card
>>>>>>     dd of=/dev/DEVICE if=/tmp/soekris.image bs=64k
>>>>>>             
>>>>> The original CF is 512Mb and the new is 4Gb.
>>>>> I don't know if that works, but for sure would waste
>>>>>  3.5Gb
>>>>>
>>>>> Many thanks.   Marco
>>>>>           
>>>> What's the file system?  If it's ext2, you can resize the partition 
>>>> after you copy the data using dd as described above.
>>>>         
>>> What you are sayng is not clear to me.
>>> If you dd a partitioned, bootable device, let's say /dev/sda,
>>>  you copy also the boot block and the partition table to the image
>>>
>>> dd'ing the image on the new CF you have the original partition table, so
>>>  the dimension of the partition is the same and the volume dimension 
>>>  are wrong.
>>>
>>> Am I missing something?
>>>
>>> Many thanks to all for your time and help.   Marco
>>>
>>>       
>> Correct, but after it's on the new larger device, you can expand the 
>> size of the partition IF the file system supports that operation.  ext2 
>> does support growing the file system.  Something like gparted will work 
>> nicely for you if you have a Linux desktop.  Otherwise, grab a bootable 
>> CD that has gparted as one of the available utilities.
>>
>>     
>
> It seems to me that in that case you might as well do it properly and
> mke2fs, mount, rsync the content and install the boot loader, all of
> which can easily be done from a shell script if you need to automate the
> process.
>
> A fresh installation of the OS on the Soekris box will give you the
> cleanest and most reliable installation if the CF is being moved from
> one type of box to another, if that's not too much trouble. It may take
> up less time than finding and fixing compatibility "bugs" afterwards.
>
>
> Bill
>
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