[SOLVED] duplicate/clone an xbian installation

[Exnor]

(10th May, 2013 06:03 AM)captainsammitch Wrote:  Apologies if this thread is somehow an infraction against the forum procedures or out of format or in the wrong forum, but I checked the FAQ and other threads and haven't found an answer thus far. I work at a store in a modest-sized chain of computer stores and was recently handed the assignment (well, I kind of volunteered) to build a looping video kiosk for product promos, tech demos, and the like. I used the most recent release on an RPi v2 and have it configured exactly how I want it - plug it in, it boots into XBMC, shuffles the videos in a playlist and loops them continuously with no interaction needed. It's completely self-contained and everything is on the SD card.

Our store manager and I hit on the idea at the exact same time that if you could somehow clone that SD card with everything on it and ready to go, then you could have an identical kiosk in every store in the chain. Unfortunately, everything I've tried thus far to duplicate my existing installation has fallen flat. The problem is that the partition XBian is using for the root filesystem won't show up in any of the OSes to which I have access - I've tried XP, 7, 8, OSX 10.6, Mint 14 KDE, and even Paragon, DriveImageXML, and Clonezilla show that partition as unallocated space or don't pick it up at all. The only way I can add/remove videos or edit the contents of my userdata folder and subfolders is by piping in for FTP via SSH using WinSCP; I use PuTTY to config everything.

So what I'm wondering is, can I somehow clone the card on which XBian and our videos are kept so that I can pop the duplicate into another RPi and have the exact same thing happen that happens with our display unit when I come in in the morning? Or am I just going to have to do a separate install procedure on each card and manually drag-and-drop the media and any userdata and configs via the FTP program? I have a feeling the first option would be quite a bit quicker and make my manager a lot more likely to pitch this to home office. Any advice would be appreciated.

Dont know if this will help you, but i always clone my SDcard with xbian to my 2nd Pi with Norton Ghost 8.0... its old soft but runs well on win7 & 8...

No issue so far.. in fact i keep an image of a stable setup on backup just in case i mess up any of the Pi's