Sure you can. It’s not the best way, but you can do it. dd will not auto expand the partitions to fill up the extra disk space. You can use gparted to resize the partitions after you restore. I use gparted on an Ubuntu install/boot/live cd since I always have a disk with me anyway.
I tried so much and I was giving up, but at the end I succeed! I’ve managed to boot with an Amazon Linux AMI ported under vmware! I’m almost a newby, but I did it, after hours of trials, substituting the original amazon kernel with a vmlinuz-2.6.32-38-generic taken from an ubuntu 64 10.04 distro. I … Read more
You can use qemu-nbd in Linux to access a disk image as if it were a block device. Here are some examples of operations that can be performed from a live Knoppix terminal. su modprobe nbd qemu-nbd –read-only –connect=/dev/nbd0 –format=vpc <vhd_file_name> If VHDX format: qemu-nbd –connect=/dev/nbd0 –format=VHDX <vhdx_file_name> ddrescue –verbose –force /dev/nbd0 /dev/sda # write … Read more
A better solution would be to use Windows Server Backup. It’s native to Windows Server 2008 R2 It supports full computer backups which can be used to perform bare metal restores, even to different hardware It natively uses VSS It can be used to restore individual files as well as restoring the entire computer
Inside every clonezilla image, there is a file called sda-pt.parted. You can edit the sector size of /dev/sda to be smaller than your target hard drive. Here is how we do it: Install OS and programs Shrink partition in OS to lowest possible value (we find under 80 works best) Sysprep and clone Edit image/sda-pt.parted … Read more
Create a directory to mount your source. mkdir /tmp/bootiso Loop mount the source ISO you are modifying. (Download from Red Hat / CentOS.) mount -o loop /path/to/some.iso /tmp/bootiso Create a working directory for your customized media. mkdir /tmp/bootisoks Copy the source media to the working directory. cp -r /tmp/bootiso/* /tmp/bootisoks/ Unmount the source ISO and … Read more
On the source machine: dump -0 -f – / | ssh -c blowfish root@target_machine “cd /; restore -rf -” This will dump the fs on your source machine, copy it over ssh and on the target machine it will restore it. Of course you need to repeat this for every fs. ‘blowfish’ is there just … Read more
I know you can do this in UNetbootin gui. I haven’t tried it myself, but it looks like you can do it by command-line, as well: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/unetbootin/wiki/commands unetbootin method=diskimage isofile=”my.iso” installtype=USB targetdrive=/dev/sdc1
For your specific use case (base image + qcow2 overlay), the RAW format should be preferred: It’s faster: as it has no metadata associated, it is as fast as possible. On the other hand, Qcow2 has two layer of indirection that must be crossed before to hit the actual data As the overlay layer must … Read more
virt-sparsify can do all this with less hassle on your part: http://libguestfs.org/virt-sparsify.1.html