[lug] lilo, dd, /boot

[D. Stimits]

"D. Stimits" wrote:
> 
> I'm experimenting with upgrading a system to use XFS filesystem, and one
> of the main problems with this is usually the requirement to have an
> entire mirror of the original install (including being able to boot it).
> I'm at the point where I have probably a good mirror on an IDE drive for
> "/" of a scsi, now I need to make a valid "/boot" for the IDE based on
> the scsi. Once I have them copied, I can do a chroot and run lilo to
> install on the IDE; I then merely switch my bios to boot IDE before scsi
> (they are both integrated controllers). What I'm interested in doing
> here is avoiding what looks like a snafu in the making. During the copy
> of /boot on scsi to /boot on IDE, I probably need to use dd rather than
> cp or cpio or tar. Can someone confirm that? If so, what is the simplest
> way to do a dd copy of all files in one /boot to all files in the other
> /boot? Pretend the original is /boot/, and the IDE is /mnt/ide/boot/.
> Can I specify just if= and of=, or must I specify block sizes or counts?
> 
> D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

Being anxious to try things out, I went ahead and tested via dd, if=,
of=, and no other arguments. The chroot and lilo worked great, I now
have a mirror of my test that runs on the IDE instead of scsi, with root
filesystem XFS. There were a few things that did not copy over as
expected from /dev/, I'm wondering how people here might get a good copy
of /dev/ to another partition? I ended up running MAKEDEV, and even then
I had to manually recreate a few items. Originally I had tried via tar,
but ran into problems based on disk constraints and problems getting tar
to do everything I wanted. So I then went with cp -adpr. Apparently I
should have used cp -adpR instead. Does anyone have a suggestion for
making a complete copy of an existing "/" onto a new partition? I can
use dd separately for /boot/ items, but am looking for something less
clumsy than cp -adpR for other things.

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com