Special Help needed. Read It Please.

English Install/Boot/Login
#21

Hi,

if you follow the link I gave you, there are FAQs and HowTos on how to use Suse Studio…

HTH

Lenwolf

#22

@OP: what keeps you from installing 11.3 on the second PC, import the mountpoints, install skype from one of the user repos. Should work.

The way to do what you want, is to temporarily move the HDD in pc2 to pc1 (i.e. open the case of pc2, get the disk out, build it in in pc1), then ‘dd’ the entire pc1-disk in pc1 to the pc-disk. To help you we need to see what it looks like when the disk is built in. And …you’d have to make some manual changes before things will work.

#23

As DenverD wrote you will need to make changes to the /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab to change the partition Device by IDs used by PC1 to those used by PC2.

Print the mount, /etc/fstab and fdisk -l outputs from both PC1 and PC2.
Then after cloning you can use the printouts and boot Gparted LiveCD or an OpenSuSe boot DVD/CD to make the changes on PC2.

For example the /etc/fstab:


PC1 :->  lpr /etc/fstab  &&  cat /etc/fstab 
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3300620AS_5QF09JXR-part4    swap    swap    defaults 0 0 
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3300620AS_5QF09JXR-part2    /    ext4    acl,user_xattr 1 1 
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3300620AS_5QF09JXR-part1    /boot    ext3    defaults 1 2 
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3300620AS_5QF09JXR-part3    /home    ext4    acl,user_xattr 1 2 
....

##  PC2 after clone  
PC2 :->  cat /etc/fstab 
 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3300620AS_5QF09JXR-part4    swap    swap    defaults 0 0 
 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3300620AS_5QF09JXR-part2    /    ext4    acl,user_xattr 1 1 
 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3300620AS_5QF09JXR-part1    /boot    ext3    defaults 1 2 
 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3300620AS_5QF09JXR-part3    /home    ext4    acl,user_xattr 1 2 
 ....
 
##  PC2 after changing Device by IDs back to original Devices in PC2
PC2 :->  cat /etc/fstab 
 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3100028AS_3QF09HYR-part4    swap    swap    defaults 0 0 
 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3100028AS_3QF09HYR-part2    /    ext4    acl,user_xattr 1 1 
 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3100028AS_3QF09HYR-part1    /boot    ext3    defaults 1 2 
 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3100028AS_3QF09HYR-part3    /home    ext4    acl,user_xattr 1 2 
 ....

The Gparted example used here was for a Windows XP installation but the concept is the same for OpenSuse, note at the bottom of the Gparted example the author cautions against booting before changing Grub.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/move/move.htm

#24

Just a short comment suggesting an alt approach…

Identify what part of your install is easy to clone… ie If similar hardware than you can image a completed install. Know beforehand that any hardware diffs are supported by udev (automatic identification and install). Some imaging software has very good support for dissimilar hardware, others not so much so your choice can be important.

You can also prepare your custom distro by including packages of common apps and support for specific hardware, not necessarily already installed.

As needed, you can script manual modifications like hardware not supported by udev and software dependent on the hardware, plus machine specific settings like machine name and network settings.

Lastly, you may want to make sure especially if my last step isn’t scripted that new clones be created disconnected from the network, you don’t want to create network problems with multiple machines using same identifiers.

All these are reasons why custom distributable OS frequently include a short “pre-install” procedure, I haven’t yet found one that OpenSuSE works closely with.

Tony