There are many ways to backup/restore/clone a drive, but here's what we did to get 3 working PCs from the one good source.
We also ran into a small hiccup as the SSDs that came with the new PCs were ever so slightly smaller than the one we have as a working source. This really isn't an issue though, as less than 8GB of the SSD is actually used and we were working with 32GB mSATA SSDs.
1. Create file an image of the source using CloneZilla (If you have a working Alien, this is probably a perfect time to make a backup image!)
Nothing too special with this step, there's lots of ways you can do this. We opted for using an mSATA to USB adaptor and booting CloneZilla from a USB drive on another PC, just so we didn't have to work from the pinball machine.
The image file was saved to a drive on that PC.
2. Restore the image file to the new SSD. If the SSD is the same or larger than the image file you created, this would just be pretty straight forward. Essentially a reverse of step one, you select the image file and write it to the mSATA SSD.
In our case, as the new mSATA drives were ever so slightly smaller than the source image one, CloneZilla refused to restore it. So... I restored it to an external USB hard drive, and then used the linux command "dd" to copy the partitions to the new SSD, such as the following (mostly I'm documenting in case I need to do this again):
/dev/sdc = the USB hard drive with the image restored from CloneZilla
/dev/sde = the new empty mSATA SSD
Open Shell prompt from the CloneZilla boot environment
Partition the new SSD:
# sudo fdisk /dev/sde
n to create a new partition, Primary, 1, 2048 begin, 124927 end
a to make it bootable
n to create another new partition, Primary, 2, 124928 begin, 15999999 end
w to write and save changes
p if you want to look at the partition table, should be a 60M Type 83 Linux bootable (Grub? Bootloader), and a 7.6G Type 83 Linux (Linux OS / Alien game / data)
Copy the MBR (this probably would copy the partition table too):
# sudo dd in=/dev/sdc of=/dev/sde bs=512 count=1
Copy the the partitions from the USB hard drive to the mSATA SSD:
# sudo dd in=/dev/sdc1 of=/dev/sde1 bs=64K conv=noerror,sync status=progress
# sudo dd in=/dev/sdc2 of=/dev/sde2 bs=64K conv=noerror,sync status=progress
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