[lug] linux system cloning

[Zan Lynx]

The very easiest way is to create a GRUB boot floppy.  Once you've
copied the drive, make it the boot drive, then boot from the GRUB floppy
and do the setup (hd0) command.

You could also mess with the GRUB drive mapping and make grub-install
work, but I think it's harder.

The problem here is that devices have to be translated into numbers for
the BIOS.  If the large copied drive isn't on Primary Master (for IDE),
GRUB will write a boot sector on the drive but it won't be pointing to
the right BIOS number.

The boot floppy fixes it by letting you install GRUB while the drive
actually is in boot position.  The drive mapping fixes it by telling
GRUB that Primary Slave (or whatever) should actually be used as if it
was Primary Master.

On Fri, 2003-03-14 at 17:45, Ferdinand Schmid wrote:
> HI,
> 
> I would like to "clone" an installed Linux system from a small disk to
> a larger disk.  Ghost can't do this with reiserfs and mondo is
> currently not a good choice with their complaints about glibc library
> problems...
> 
> If the disks were identical in size I would use dd but my disk size
> increase appears to prevent this solution.
> 
> I don't see why I couldn't manually partition my new disk, copy all of
> its contents, and then fix the boot sector.  My initial attempts
> failed however - grub only shows part of its greeting.  I suspect that
> the bootsector (first 512 bytes) is correct but my relocation of /boot
> through the different disk geometry may be spoiling this idea.
> 
> Any advice would be appreciated...
> 
> Ferdinand
> 
> --
> Ferdinand Schmid
> Architectural Energy Corporation
> Celebrating 21 Years of Improving Building Energy Performance
> http://www.archenergy.com
> 
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-- 
Zan Lynx <zlynx at acm.org>
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