[vox-tech] [Solved] Cloning image to mulitple usb sticks at once

[Alex Mandel]

Ok, so I found the answer. It's does involve partclone via the
Clonezilla live distro.

http://clonezilla.org/fine-print-live-doc.php?path=./clonezilla-live/doc/03_One_image_to_multiple_disks/00-boot-clonezilla-live-cd.doc#00-boot-clonezilla-live-cd.doc

There is one catch, you have to clone the usb stick to an img file 1st.
It can either be on a HDD or another usb stick. Then you start the
program over and do a restore and can choose their 1-2-mdisks option.

I just tested on 2 at once, took about 10 minutes to make the img (which
I can now reuse) and then 7 minutes to make 2x 4GB drives.
Tomorrow I'll be doing 8x 8GB drives at a time and will time that too.
Note, my times might be faster than most as the source was a 3G SATA SSD
drive.

Thanks,
Alex


On 05/01/2012 02:41 PM, Alex Mandel wrote:
> That's actually what I was afraid would be the bottleneck. Guess I
> better gather several machines together for this. How does the whole
> mass network install stuff overcome this?
> 
> Do you think it matters if the source is on the hard drive or on a usb
> stick?
> 
> Anecdotally, I have done 2 usb sticks at the same time using Ubuntu
> startup disk creator, and it does take longer but not double the time.
> 
> Thanks,
> Alex
> 
> On 05/01/2012 02:12 PM, Jeff Newmiller wrote:
>> You are overthinking it. It doesn't matter whether you have one or several images on the source disk... multiple processes will compete for access unless you have 25 hard drives because the disk heads are shared. Fortunately there is caching to alleviate some of this, but you should expect some performance hit trying to do 25 at a time.
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Jeff Newmiller                        The     .....       .....  Go Live...
>> DCN:<jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us>        Basics: ##.#.       ##.#.  Live Go...
>>                                       Live:   OO#.. Dead: OO#..  Playing
>> Research Engineer (Solar/Batteries            O.O#.       #.O#.  with
>> /Software/Embedded Controllers)               .OO#.       .OO#.  rocks...1k
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
>> Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.
>>
>> Alex Mandel <tech_dev at wildintellect.com> wrote:
>>
>>> So I've got a bootable usb stuck I want to clone. It works fine to use
>>> Clonezilla (partclone) to do one at a time. But I've got to do at least
>>> 25. Does anyone know a way that I can do more than 1 at a time.
>>>
>>> I was thinking of just opening more than one terminal and using the
>>> same
>>> source image file, but I'm worried it will just take longer as the
>>> program competes to read the original image.
>>>
>>> Note partclone or dd must be used because the source usb drive is a 2
>>> partition setup, with partition 1 being a bootable linux install.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Alex
>