Hi, I'm trying to clone a machine.
The source and target machines are identical in every way, they have the same hardware and memory. I am using a live-dvd to boot the source machine, and then run the following command from a third machine (a workstation) to create the image. ssh root@source "dd if=/dev/sda bs=128M conv=sparse | gzip -9 -" | dd of=raw.img.gz The source hard-disk is a 500 GB disk. This succeeds and produces a file that is ~29 GB in size. But when I try to restore this image onto the target machine, the operation never completes. I boot the target machine with the live-dvd and issue the following commands mkdir /mnt/remotefs sshfs user@workstation:/ /mnt/remotefs/ -C cat remotefs/raw.img.gz | gunzip | dd of=/dev/sda By monitoring the network traffic, it appears that at first, there is data transfer happening. After some time though, the traffic seems to stop, and the target-machine appears to have locked-up. What I suspect is that the target machine may in fact be receiving the data and passing it into gunzip, but (according to my limited understanding of all of this) gunzip must first receive ALL the data (29 GB) before it finishes and pipes its output to dd. The target (and source) machines only have 8 GB of RAM, so the target machine's memory must be exceeded. What am I doing wrong? Is there a better way to restore the image? Thank you
