Message

You could copy the entire hard drive to a spare hard drive, using a program like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. If you have the Enterprise version of either of these programs, you could save an image of this disk to a file on a server. Or, you could use a Clonezilla Live CD to save an image of the hard drive to a server. The server has to have NFS or TFTP enabled, and in the Clonezilla Live menu you have to select the file transfer method that matches. If you don't, Clonezilla will attempt to save the disk image to a RAM disk.

To restore, reverse the process. If you copied the freshly installed hard drive to a spare hard drive, connect the spare and use Ghost or Acronis to copy to the server's hard drive. With Clonezilla Live you MIGHT be able to boot the SPARC machine from a Clonezilla Live CD and restore from an image file on a server. I haven't tried that. What I use is Clonezilla SE (Server Edition) on the server, and network boot client machines. The client can network boot using a BIOS setting, or if BIOS does not support network boot you can use gPXE from either a 3.5" floppy or a CD. The floppy or CD just downloads a network boot image from the server, just like a BIOS network boot. You can configure DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot for Linux) a few different ways, one is thin client, another is Clonezilla. With Clonezilla it will restore the disk image. Whatever was on the hard drive when you used the Clonezilla Live CD to take an image of it, that's what will be restored. One caution though: the Clonezilla SE installation instructions from their website have an error. I had to make a correction to get it to work; a minor correction but it took some time to figure it out. I'm using Clonezilla for deployment, setting up multiple Windows PCs at once. Multicast works great, same time to download a disk image whether you're setting up 1 PC or 253; but in your case unicast would work just as well. I found it can transfer 7GB of hard drive data in 7 minutes on a 100Mb/s network.