[clue-tech] IDE hard drive duplicator with Linux support?

[David L. Willson]

Before I start researching a deeper answer, I'll ask two shallow questions:

 1. Have you looked at partimage as the software?
 2. Have you looked at USB 2.0 or FireWire B as the host-side bus?

I'd think that/those would about do what you want.

-----Original Message-----
From: clue-tech-bounces at cluedenver.org
[mailto:clue-tech-bounces at cluedenver.org] On Behalf Of Jim Ockers
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2006 17:06
To: clue-tech at cluedenver.org
Subject: [clue-tech] IDE hard drive duplicator with Linux support?

Hi CLUEbies,

We are trying to figure out how to produce our field hard
drives more quickly.  Does anyone know of a linux-friendly
IDE drive mass duplicator?  The technical challenge is LVM
support, partition type 0x8e:

/dev/hda6           298      1642  10796152+  8e  Linux LVM

The drives have Linux ext3 filesystems as well as the 
afore-mentioned LVM partition.  LVM of course maps the 
block devices in the LVM partition as follows
(from 'ls -al /dev/mapper/'):

crw-------    1 root     root      10,  63 Apr 14  2004 control
brw-------    1 root     root     254,   1 Oct  7 14:06 datavg-datalv
brw-------    1 root     root     254,   0 Mar 14 17:57 slavevg-datalv

Anyway those block devices have ext3 filesystems on them.
The amount of data on the drive is maybe 12GB but the drives
could be 80GB in size.

Right now we have an impressively large collection of machines
with removable drive bays which we use for duplicating drives.
A script creates the partitions, formats the filesystems, and
copies the drives.  Each drive takes maybe 10-15 minutes, and
we have maybe 8 systems going (each making one drive as a copy
of the other drive) in parallel with a very busy person running 
the whole thing.

It seems it would be more efficient if we could use a mass
duplicator or ghost multicast.  We think Ghost doesn't support
LVM natively so it has to run through every byte on the disk,
which is way slower for huge disks than just copying the data.

Linux dd for drive copying is right out of the question.  If
you've ever tried this and gotten it to be fast please let us
know how you did it.

Mass duplicators that don't support LVM smartly would also be slow
like ghost.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Jim

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/
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