Migrating a Business to Linux — 15

Part of our migration effort includes a disk imaging process.

The original goal of the imaging system was to quickly rebuild laptop hard drives. All but one of our laptops is a single user sign-on and are used for a single purpose in the field. We do not need backups of those systems because there are no user-specific /home directories. Imaging a system is a nice way to restore a laptop to service without performing a mind-numbing full installation and post-customizations.

I continually tweaked the imaging process with each system I migrated. Many times during those months I would experiment and add nominal tweaks. Nothing serious and always little tweaks. The imaging system worked well until I migrated the last laptop.

None of our laptops are shiny new. Translated, this means none of the laptops use EFI. Until that last laptop — a Toshiba Satellite C55D-A5146, which only supported EFI. We have a Toshiba Satellite C55D-B5242 that I had already migrated. The BIOS on that system supported legacy mode. That was not the case with the BIOS on the C55D-A5146.

On my to-do list was a line item to eventually update the imaging system to support both EFI and legacy partitions. Until that last laptop I had no urgency to implement the EFI support. Because we had two C55D laptops I presumed the second laptop had the same BIOS as the first C55D that already had been migrated.

I consumed two long afternoons updating the imaging system to support EFI systems.

Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: Migrate, Ubuntu

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