I would like to establish a deployment process for Ubuntu machines based on root FS images. I would like to restore the image onto a simply-formatted hard drive (I can completely erase the disk during deployment).I'd rather keep the config simple and not partition into separate / and /homeSo far I've tried using Clonezilla and succeeded in creating an image of the root partition that I can restore. However, using that process leas to the fact that the root partition I restore onto is small, as small as my base image when uncompressed - around 20 gigs. I would like to grow the partition on the actual hard drive to maximum capacity instead, and then restore a filesystem onto it including all symlinks and other bells and whistles.Also I am looking for a process that would reliably install and configure the bootloader and the boot partition on the drive when the partition is restored onto it. Where should I look? It seems that any dd-based processes are per block, and you are sort of forced to have your destination partition be of the same size as the image. At the same time I cannot guarantee that all the disks of the machines I am going to be deploying this way are of the same capacity... What would be the approach to take? Maybe I need a higher level imaging solution - one that backs up a filesystem instead of a partition?UPDATE: After doing some prodding into the possible configurations my question comes down to this. How do I establish a pipeline where I could do the following in one step:boot a machine off a DVD/CDformat it's hard drive as MBR/root/swap, without any empty spacemake sure that it's bootableclone the root partition off a network imageSo far we've settled on the following workflow:make an image of a small disk (70 gigs)restore it as a wholemanually go into gparted and resize the partitions so that the root partition is bigger than it's imaged versionbut it has us booting two disks in a row, which is very annoying.
Deploying filesystem images onto a partition of arbitrary size
boot;partition;dd;deployment;partimage