I want to clone the harddisk of a machine to six other identical pc's, without going through the
operating system install and application software install for each one. This strategy "seems"
reasonable! (Is it reasonable?) I did the install on the base machine; du -h shows about 5.6 Gb.
I used my external dvd+rw to burn the files, which required two dvds.
On one, I copied all of the files except /usr, and I copied /usr to the other dvd;
/usr is large, since that's where I installed all of the application software.

I want to boot the other machines with Knoppix 3.7, and install the files on both dvds to their
hard disks. The pc's to be cloned, when booted with Knoppix 3.7 with the dvd+rw (usb) plugged
in, do show that the dvd writer is mounted.

My question: How exactly do I prepare the hard drive for this cloning process? I use ext2 for
a small /boot partition, and ext3 for all others, except swap. I managed to delete all files on
the machine that I tried this on (yes, it really is easier to destroy than create!) Do I need to
format the hds, or can I just copy everything over? I do have the original partition table from
the base machine saved with sfdisk. Is there an easier or more obvious way to do this?

Thanks in advance!
Ferrel