[SOLVED] Cloning the image of an UP board

Nonobaku Hisoka
Nonobaku Hisoka New Member Posts: 3
edited May 2019 in UP Board Linux
Hello there everyone!

I've recently purchased a bunch of UP-Boards and I want to deploy a custom linux installation to all of these.

Here's my current situation:

I have four up-boards laying around here of which I have one of them completely configured with UBILINUX (Let's name this one COMPLETE). Now what I want to do is either clone the complete system from COMPLETE or make a custom image which I can deploy on the other three up-boards. I just don't seem to be able to figure out how to make this happen.

Things I've tried already:

Re-Do Backup & Recovery Tool - Didn't work because I can't seem to make a normal bootable USB that is recognized by the UP-Board in the boot-menu.

Clonezilla - I've tried this option right here MANY times. In the beginning I kept getting the error that it couldn't read/write a certain part of the system ( I didn't document it, pretty silly but I can't give you guys any error messages right now ) and as of now it's completely buggy when I'm trying to make an image of the system. I've already tried making a new Clonezilla bootable USB-drive thinking it might be a problem with the software after so many attempts but this didn't work either. When this didn't work I completely reset the UP-Board and made the same configuration base as I had before thinking it might be a problem with the configured up-board, however, this also doesn't fix the errors I'm getting in Clonezilla

DD full system copy to USB - This option I'm actually trying right now, which is basically using the command sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0 of=/dev/sda which according to online tutorials should copy the entire disk 1:1. Only after doing this and putting into the INCOMPLETE up-board I can't seem to find a way to copy the entire USB to the harddisk of the UP-board because I can't seem to figure out how to do this in an EFI shell.

If anyone of you have any experience considering cloning or making an image of an UP-board please give me some guidance in a solution for this issue.

I thank you all in advance!

Hisoka-

Comments

  • Ken
    Ken New Member Posts: 48
    I don't use it that often so I can't give you details from memory, but you'll need to boot into a rescue shell, by interrupting the boot process and editing the boot file. This will boot into a very limited environment that runs off a ram disk and will allow you to mount the root filesystem to the ramfs filesystem you boot into. At that level you should be able to dd the root filesystem to a USB thumb drive as an exact copy. You would still probably need to do a base install on your other boards so that you have this capability on your targets. I will be doing this soon probably in order to move /var and /home over to an M.2 SSD, and effectively make the onboard DoC a mostly readonly device, since these type devices tend to be fairly write lifetime limited, and SSDs are write managed.
  • Charles Tuttle
    Charles Tuttle New Member Posts: 3
    edited March 2017
    This seems like one topic truly deserving of a tutorial. Like Kamarasu I have tried a few things and frankly I’m rather terrified of this stuff. I learned the hard way using dd when I overwrote the data I was trying to save once (i’m a better programmer than an IT guy). I have several months of development on my first Up-Board and yes I have backed up my code but I made lots of alterations to the system and just want to copy what I know works.
  • Nonobaku Hisoka
    Nonobaku Hisoka New Member Posts: 3
    Hello everyone,

    I have found a way to clone the image of an UP board using CloneZilla, turned out that there were just a few extra tweaks that were necessary after putting back the image.

    I have made a guide on how to clone the image, but as of now it is in Dutch.

    If you have any interest in the file please let me know and I will translate it to English and share it here.

    Kind Regards,

    Kamarasu
  • raphael
    raphael New Member Posts: 1
    Hello Kamarasu !
    HELP.
    My usb3 connector of my firt upboard is dead and I need urgently to clone it to a second one... same hardware. ( 64Gb memory, 8Gb ram)

    Please if you have any solution or tutorial to share with me/us about cloning it would help me.
    Even if it is in Dutch, you can explain me in private and I will translate for everybody thanks to google translate ;-)

    thanks a lot in advance

    RAPHAËL
  • Charles Tuttle
    Charles Tuttle New Member Posts: 3
    Yes I was able to clone my Up-Board with Clonezilla using a combination of two tutorials, but Thank you Kamarasu for creating the guide and spreading the knowledge !
  • theodoros p
    theodoros p New Member Posts: 24
    edited November 2017
    It seems to work except that on my UP2 the flash appears as /dev/mmcblk0!
  • theodoros p
    theodoros p New Member Posts: 24
    If I restore that image to a usb flash can I boot it to an pc like live image?iv tried but even the uefi can detect the usb flash I can see the ubilinux or BOOT folder in the EFI folder of the image I created and when I hit to boot BOOTX64.EFI
    the output is :
    error:no such partition
    Entering rescue mode
    Grub rescue
    I recently got a damaged emmc in my upboard 2 and I was wondering if I could boot the cloned image from external disk
  • Cris
    Cris New Member Posts: 3

    try to use Clonezilla?

  • ciara
    ciara New Member Posts: 2

    @Nonobaku Hisoka said:
    Hello everyone,

    I've tried to quickly translate both of my manuals ( Creating an image / Restoring an image ) and uploaded them on this website:

    How to create an image for an up-board:

    https://www.scribd.com/document/343499153/Creating-an-Image-Up-Board

    How to restore an image for an up-board:

    https://www.scribd.com/document/343499210/Restoring-Image-Up-Board

    I believe you can read the documents while you're on the website, so no need to download anything.

    If it's against the rules to post links to files I apologize, I simply don't have the time to type all of this in a neat way on the forum, unfortunately I also have to work!

    I hope these manuals can help you all, please let me know if it did!

    Kind Regards,
    Kamarasu

    Hi Kamarasu

    Thanks for sharing these, could you kindly upload these to Google drive or somewhere free, Scribd seems to be the worst place to read this since they dont let you view files for long nor download these without paying them
    Please email the documents to inbox at zubairahmed dot net

  • Sil
    Sil New Member Posts: 29 ✭✭

    Hello everybody.

    Please, could you share the guide in another place more readable? Scribd is limited...
    Anoter question, I have only one user set to my board, let's call it myuser.
    When I login I use:

    • user: myuser
    • password: mypassword
      And of course when I use su or sudo, I must type the password mypassword.
      Why must I remove it before cloning? I am a little worried about that because I tried to modify the sudoers file using visudo but I closed myself out of the system all the times...

    Thanks.

    Silvano

    Eng. Silvano Bertoldo, PhD

  • Sil
    Sil New Member Posts: 29 ✭✭

    Actually nothing special is required.
    If you properly use clonezilla, everything works without any problems!

    No problem with password, root permissions etc.
    _Clonezilla _makes just an image of your system and you can restore it in another system with the same characteristics and hardware.

    I used it and succesfully make a clone and a restore of my system.

    Silvano

    Eng. Silvano Bertoldo, PhD

  • Munawar
    Munawar New Member Posts: 3

    Hi,guys,

    I would like to thank you all. Specially to Nonobaku Hisoka, your tutorial helped me alot.
    I would like you to add one thing that, in the section for creating Clonezilla bootable USB, it is for windows. If any body is using GNU/Linux then follow this link:
    https://clonezilla.org/liveusb.php#linux-setup

    I myself used Method B from the link. Other seems to be having some error with me. But you can give a try.

    Kind regards,
    Munawar Ali