[SOLVED] Clone Archlinux to USB flash drive

Question

Hello,
I want to clone an existing Archlinux installation (x86-64)  from a hard drive to a 32 GB USB flash drive. I want to be able to boot from the USB stick on my Win7 labtop.
I already took some measures to prepare my hard drive (with gparted). After moving all movies, pics etc to external stores and shrinking the home drive (sda4), it now looks like this:
- sda1 Boot (small)
- sda2 Swap (small)
- sda3 Root ( ca.8GB)
- sda4 Home (ca. 22GB)
I tried to take an image of the entire hard-disk (ca. 250GB) with clonezilla and restore it to the USB flash drive, but got an error message - original disk to big (250GB vs 32GB), besides only ca 30GB of the 250GB being assigned to partitions.
Now I'm looking for a way to bring only the necessary partitions from the harddisk to the USB stick, hoping to have exactly the same Archlinux configuration as a bootable installation on the USB stick afterwards (bootable on a Win7 labtop ... and maybe from my main Archlinux machine too). There is a wiki article about the topic, but its rather about installing a fresh system than cloning an existing system. The related questions on the forum (searching in 'installation' for 'clone usb') did not answer my question.
Maybe somebody did successfully what I'm planning to do and can give me some tips?
Last edited by 4on6 (2012-04-16 12:57:01)

Answer 1

4on6 wrote:Create two new partitions - with gparted p.ej.? And do I have to worry about the filesystems - must they be the same like for the original partitions on my hard-disk?
I prefer Gparted, it's easy as cake
The filesystems don't have to be the same as the original partitions. I prefer ext4 (universally supported) or jfs (uses very little CPU), but I recommend you ext4.
In fact, you can use a hard drive instead of a flash drive and this is how you clone a Linux installation manually!
4on6 wrote:So I mount both - source and destination partitions (/mnt/dest/ suggests it ...)?
Yes. I mount the source partition in /mnt/source and the destination partition in /mnt/dest, and then I issue
rsync -av /mnt/source/ /mnt/dest
and wait for it to finish. Then I unmount the partitions and mount the other ones and repeat the same thing.
4on6 wrote:I create that /boot folder on the flash drives root partition, right? Won't that cause problems later on with rsync, when I update the installation and there is an additional folder on the target partition?
Since the root directory you'll aready copy on the flash disk won't have the /boot directory, simple do a
mkdir /mnt/dest/boot
while your destination partition is still mounted. Unmount the source root partition, mount the boot one and then type:
rsync -av /mnt/source/ /mnt/dest/boot
and GRUB and the kernel will be copied to the /boot folder on the destinaton partition on the flash disk.
Make sure that in /mnt/dest/etc/fstab you comment out the line for mounting the /boot partition, if any.
4on6 wrote:I've seen those UUIDs as output of a linux command (mount? fdisk?), but I don't recall which one - how do I get these UUIDs?
Use Gparted, right click any partition and click Information. In the window that appears, in the middle you can double-click the UUID and press Ctrl-C to copy it. Then you can paste it in the text editor and use it for /etc/fstab or /boot/grub/menu.lst. That's why I love Gparted for such stuff.
4on6 wrote:Do I send this command from the live Arch-CD, and is it the only command necessary (I have not much experience with grub)?
Yes, since Arch uses GRUB 1 on the installation CD you can uste the command I gave you to reinstall GRUB on the flash disk with the settings you already entered for the /boot/grub/menu.lst file.
Make sure you boot the CD in 64 bit mode if the Arch you installed is 64 bit. Just to be safe.
4on6 wrote:I will ...
Be very careful, I didn't and lost ALL my files by mistake in typing. Triple-check the directory you are currently working in! ALWAYS make a backup!
4on6 wrote:Great that this is possible, hope I manage to get it done. Thanks again.
You're welcome. Please inform me if this little tutorial suited you so I can make a wiki entry for it, if the admins allow.