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NTR Dual Boot Re-Image Project

Kevin Valentine has been leading up an effort in Philadelphia, here’s an update on the project from him, thanks Kevin!

The “NTR Dual Boot Re-Image Project” has made considerable progress over the past few weeks.  The NTR people liked the demo for the proposed dual-boot system.  After that it was just a simple matter of transferring that drive image to other drives of various sizes.

NTR has a drive duplicator made by Kanguru.  Several attempts were made to make  it work for our purposes.  Most were successful but there were random failures on known-good drives.  Turned out the Kanguru duplicator was bad and had to be sent back to the vendor.  As a backup solution, a PC was set aside just for writing Xubuntu images to hard drives.

After rigorous testing on Nov 14th, the PC-based solution has successfully imaged 23 hard drives of mixed makes and sizes.  The imaging solution is a bit clumsy but it works.  We can connect up to 5 hard drives with usb-ide adapters and image them in parallel.  It takes about 10-15 minutes to image 5 drives.  If the Kanguru gets fixed, things will be much faster.

The next step is to test out the imaged drives by placing them in 20+ different models of desktop PCs.  This is where we need the support of the LoCo team.  The target date for this will be either December 6th or the 13th.  It still needs to be discussed more with NTR and the LoCo team.  If the drives work well on the desktop PCs, NTR should be able to move forward with full scale drive duplications and installations.  If things continue work out, our next step is to provide a dual-boot solution on their single drive laptops.  This could be a bit more difficult.  We’re thinking a network imaging solution like Clonezilla could make it happen.

For those of you that are new or have missed the discussions, the basic idea of this project is this: NTR needs to provide their customers with a simple solution for restoring their Windows drive.  A simple solution was provided by installing Xubuntu on a separate drive and creating/modifying a few scripts.  The end result is a dual-boot, dual-drive desktop system that allows the user to boot into Windows or Xubuntu, or just restore Windows.  More details on the project can be found here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/CommunityOutreachTeam/NTRDualBootImage


This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 2:39 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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