Cloning the harddisk

[alz]

Hello,

I am more of a windows person with not all too much in-depth knowledge about the Unix/Mac world (or anything, actually, as I feel right now 🙄 ), please bear with me. 🙂

Here’s the situation: We have a number of Intel-based MacMinis at our institute, which run a triple-boot installation using rEFIt boot loader. The ones we have are of the previous generation and run MacOS 10.4, OpenSuSE (not sure which version from the top of my head) and Windows XP. The whole system has it’s problems, but all in all it works.

We’ve been using the Unix tool “dd” to clone the hard disk of those macs from a master installation. The exact process is:
* Boot up from an Ubuntu Live-CD
* Connect to a network share on a Windows file server, using smbfs.
* Dump /dev/sda into a file on that share or respectively dump the file to /dev/sda on new target Macs.
Probably not very elegant, but it works.

Now come the newest generation of MacMinis, with new chipset, and MacOS 10.5. The old installation doesn’t work anymore on the changed hardware, so I set up a new master installation on one of the new Macs. But when I clone it to another MacMini, things go horribly wrong: The partition table does not seem to be copied. Unnecessary to say: The freshly cloned Mac does not boot. When I examine the hard disk with a partition editor (e.g. Gparted which comes with Ubuntu, or MacOS’s own Partition Manager started from the Install DVD) the hard disk is displayed as completely empty.

With the older generation the above process worked perfectly fine, and I can’t honestly see why it wouldn’t anymore. As I understand it dd should create a bit-identical clone, including the partition table and everything. What am I missing?

[alz]

Nevermind this, it was a pebkac problem. dd was working just fine all along. God, I feel silly now… 😳

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