How to create image of currently installed ubuntu (on my laptop)?

image, ubuntu

Solution

You can use remastersys, but that's typically used when you know you're resintalling many machines with the same customizations. You can find that info here: http://debianhelp.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/how-to-install-and-use-remastersys-in-ubuntu-os/

If you just want to clone a partition and move it to a new disk, you should look into clonezilla. http://clonezilla.org/

If the disks are exactly the same size and don't want to use clonezilla, I've successfully used the 'dd' command. For convenience, I also used a usb disk docking station like this one http://j.mp/KVMJUe. You'll need to put the image on the disk there (since it would be too large to fit on the laptop itself), boot the new laptop off a live cd, get to a command prompt, and copy the image to the new laptop drive.

For reference, I'd check these places:

http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/ddcommand.htm

http://www.backuphowto.info/linux-backup-hard-disk-clone-dd

Here's a quote:

Making a Hard Disk Image File

Most of time you don't want to make a complete duplication of your hard disk. You may prefer to creating an image file of the hard disk and save it in other storage devices. The following command will create an image file "disk1.img" in your user's directory from /dev/sda:

    dd if=/dev/sda of=~/disk1.img

Since you have created an image file, you can compress it with "gzip" or "bzip2":

    gzip disk1.img #generates disk1.img.gz or

    bzip2 disk1.img #generates disk1.img.bz2

You can save much storage space with compression. But it will take very long time.

Restoring from an Image File

To restore a partition or a hard disk from an image file, just exchange the arguments "if" and "of". For example, restore the whole hard disk from the image file "disk1.img":

    dd if=disk1.img of=/dev/sda

Restore the first partition of /dev/sda from the image file "disk2.img":

    dd if=disk2.img of=/dev/sda1

Problem

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