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Does anyone have a recent resource on creating a recovery partition or a recovery DVD? I have Ubuntu 16.04 with xfce4 installed and running just fine.

Three choices:

1) A bootable recovery partition, and then clone the entire drive (empty primary partition, swap, and recovery partition) to DVD as a second recovery medium (preferred).

2) Clone to self booting, self installing DVD (second choice).

3) Customer preseeding an Ubuntu Desktop install DVD (also acceptable but it is quite intricate to get right).

A base install (operating and uncompressed) is taking up 7 gb, so compresssion is a consideration if the entire recovery is to fit on a single DVD.

Mondo sounded like a possibility, but I can't get it to install and run on Ubuntu 16.04. Development within mondo has not progressed on mindi-busybox, and mindi-busybox is a required dependency.

Charles Chambers
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    An alternative is to use Clonezilla and create a compressed image of the whole drive. You would use Clonezilla to restore/clone from the image too. So the end user needs a Clonezilla boot drive plus the media with the image (I would suggest two USB pendrives). See http://clonezilla.org – sudodus Oct 06 '17 at 17:12
  • I'm trying to get away from 2 media and step by step instructions. Zero extra media with a recovery partition, and a recovery DVD that recreates a drive consisting of an empty root partition, an empty swap partition, and the recovery partition with a bootable image for hands-off recovery - boot to it, confirm a couple of times, and then hands off. – Charles Chambers Oct 08 '17 at 18:42
  • Maybe you can use a system like this, https://askubuntu.com/questions/930233/how-can-i-make-a-bootable-unattended-usb-restore-disk/930489#930489 or maybe get some tip that help you make your own system. (You could extract/clone from a compressed image file.) – sudodus Oct 08 '17 at 19:16
  • I tried Pinguy, but that appears to just produce a live environment and no installation capability. It also kept some remnants of Unity, whereas the test system has nothing of Unity left on it. – Charles Chambers Oct 08 '17 at 23:58
  • You can include the installer ubiquity into your system to get installation capabilitty. – sudodus Oct 09 '17 at 05:41

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I like clonezilla.
Clonezilla is a backup/clone utility similar to Norton Ghost. It can be downloaded from http://clonezilla.org

You would have a few options using clonezilla.

1) clone the drive to an external that is the same size or larger.

2) clone partitions to an external drive that has room for the partitions.

3) make an image of the drive or partitions that can be stored in the clonezilla partition (if it is large enough), a designated recovery partition, or burned to DVD.
Note: burning to DVD requires that you have space to store the image, and a DVD burning program to make a data disk.

Clonezilla itself is a LiveMedia image, so it can be burnt to CD/DVD, USB stick, or extracted to a HDD partition.

I personally extracted it to a partition on my HDD, and added entries from it's grub.config file to my grub so I can launch it from my normal grub menu.

ravery
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  • I'm considering Clonezilla, but it seems too complex to partition a DVD to put Clonezilla (as a live environment) on one partition and the recovery image on the other. I'm hoping one CD and one DVD is not state of the art... – Charles Chambers Oct 09 '17 at 00:02
  • it works well as a bootable CD. space on the HDD will be necessary to store the image which you can later burn to DVDs. My recommendation is to make a recovery partition on the HDD for the image, the size depends on how much information you are backing up (clonezilla does use compression). Then burn a DVD backup in case of complete drive failure. NOTE: clonezilla can also store to a remote drive. – ravery Oct 09 '17 at 00:48
  • I understand, but I'm trying to get down to one recovery media maximum. I think I can add the drive image along with Clonezilla onto a single DVD. For the HDD, it should boot to the recovery partition confirm restore, and start the recovery with no additional media.

    There's a user here called iplustech that has a HOWTO regarding the iso reverse engineerying of the preseed process, and that appears to be a much better start. If I can puzzle it out, it will do nicely for making a recovery DVD.

     – Charles Chambers Oct 09 '17 at 23:45
  • And I think I may have it. Clonezilla has the ability to convert a clone image into an ISO image that is bootable and from which a restore can be conducted. That gets me down to one installation media. Now to see how to get an image on a third partition, and back up the first two without including it. Even if I have to include a DVD to kick off an install from within the partition, that'll still make it one disc for the entire recovery environment. – Charles Chambers Oct 21 '17 at 12:48
  • @CharlesChambers -- fantastic. – ravery Oct 21 '17 at 12:55