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my apologies in advance if this has already been answered elsewhere (something like this has but years ago and I am still confused about the steps to take). Here is my end task:

  • Provide a bootable/persistent USB drive to a team of engineers (travelling field engineers) to use it on their laptops. By our company rules they cannot install Linux on a second partition so this is the only option.
  • The bootable USB must have all the SW tools they will need to carry out their tasks (we work on networks of proprietary industrial controllers).

I am running Ubuntu 19.10 (Eonian) in a VBM under windows 7 on my computer and so far I have successfully installed all the SW planned (including some tools that need Wine since they were developed in Windows XP and 7), sorted out whatever wasn't working, deleted applications we don't need and wrote quite some scripts to get everything in line.

Now the idea would be to make a bootable copy (and persistent since there is the necessity to save stuff -aka files- when using the customized tools) of the environment I built as-it-is.

Is it possible with ubuntu 19.10? Can anyone point me in the right step-by-step direction?

Thnx in advance.

Caligola
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1 Answers1

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Clone Full install Drive to Multiple USB Drives

  • Create Full install USB drive that will boot in both BIOS and UEFI modes.

See: How to Create a Full Install of Ubuntu 19.10 to USB Device Step by Step

  • Make your Target drive on the smallest USB drive that will hold everything you need, the larger the drive the more time it takes to backup and restore.

  • Upload and install the tools, software and scripts that you need to distribute to your team of engineers.

  • Create an image file, (.img), of the Target drive using Disks in Linux. (dd may be used by experianced users).

  • Extract the image file to the engineers USB drives using Disks. or mkusb in Linux or Win32 Disk Imager or balenaEtcher in Windows.

  • After installing the image files use GParted to Resize the ext4 and or NTFS partitions to fill the drive.

  • If two or more USB drive clones are used in the same computer at the same time create new UUID's using GParted.

C.S.Cameron
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