I want to be able to temporarily plug in the root drive of another host
to my laptop and run propellor to re-image the drive with the properties of
the host it belongs to. This is especially useful when the drive is too
large to make a DiskImage on my laptop.

Open design questions:

* How to uniquely identify which removable drive belongs to which Host?
  Could use partition uuids for updating an already imaged drive, but not
  for the initial build.

  /dev/disk/by-id/ seems a good way to go. Eg for a USB drive I have,
  "/dev/disk/by-id/usb-LaCie_iamaKey_37637172f536ba-0:0" probably uniquely
  identifies it, at least as long as the manufacturer is not reusing serial
  numbers.

  One problem with /dev/disk/by-id/ is, if a removable drive is attached
  on a different bus (ie, a SATA drive might be connected via SATA or a USB
  dock), it won't appear the same there.

  Could instead use eg `udevadm info --query=all -n /dev/sdb`, which
  breaks out `ID_SERIAL`. However, this would be harder for the user to
  look up. Or, could parse the /dev/disk/by-id/ name, excluding the bus
  part of it.

  Question: When using microsd card adapter, does the serial number pass
  through so different microsds can be distinguished?

  > Checked this, and two microsd card adapters from different
  > manufacturers with different microsd cards have the same by-id.
  > Those must have no serial number..
  > 
  > Also, a USB SD/microSD reader had the same by-id for multiple cards.

  > > For disks with a MBR, there's a disk identifier / volume id, 
  > > which should uniquely identify that disk,
  > > as long as propellor does not overwrite the MBR when imaging it.
  > > And, GPT has a similar disk GUID.
  > >
  > > /dev/disk/by-partuuid exposes this. Some documentation suggests
  > > it's GPT-only, but my laptop is not GPT and its MBR disk identifier
  > > shows up there. Oddly, that points to /dev/sda1 and not /dev/sda.
  > >
  > > blkid can also display it, as the PTUUID, which works for
  > > both GPT and MBT.
  > > --[[Joey]]

	root@darkstar:/home/joey>blkid /dev/sda
	/dev/sda: PTUUID="d0497bc6" PTTYPE="dos"

* Should an already imaged drive be updated incrementally or re-imaged?
  Seems both cases would be useful, the former especially for incrementally
  configuring it, the latter to bring it up from a clean state.
  If it defaults to updating, the user could force a re-image by deleting
  the partitions from the drive manually.

secret-project has some code for /target which might be reusable here.

--[[Joey]]
