Backing up and restoring a cubieboard nand installation

Last time, I showed you how to run chrome browser on cubieboard in kiosk mode.

As we have several TVs with a cubieboard, I did not want to go through all these steps again and again. There is a rather simple way of cloning a nand image.

You will need a micro-SD card and install any linux on that. I used http://cubian.org/downloads/ for that.

So download the appropriate image, unzip it and install it on your sd card using:

dd if=cubian.img of=/dev/YOUR_DEVICE bs=4096; sync

Once done, put the SD card into your cubieboard and boot. The default credentials are cubie/cubie.

To create an image run:
dd if=/dev/nand conv=sync,noerror bs=64K | gzip -c -9 > /nandimg.gz



Later you can restore that image using on a new board
gunzip nandimg.gz; dd if=/nand.img conv=sync,noerror bs=64K of=/dev/nand

Be aware that you need to change a few settings if you are reusing this image on several boards:
hostname - /etc/hostname and or /etc/hosts
hwaddress - /etc/network/interfaces