cloning bootable hard drive

[Jarod Wilson]

On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 05:09 -0800, R Hofland wrote:
> I'm not having a lot of luck doing quick clones of my installs from one bootable hard drive to create another bootable drive. I haven't tried all my options yet but I thought it wise to ask the community for advice. 
> 
> Again, it is Suse 10.3 using the Grub boot loader which resides in the root partition, but I'd like to be able to do this with any flavor of Linux and booter. A bootable CD with appropriate software to quickly create a bootable drive with swap, /, etc. and then copy all of the files from the original drive is best. I have Acronis but it has not worked so well for my Suse installs.

When I replaced the hard drive in my laptop, I moved my existing install
from one drive to another using basically nothing but rsync...

The basic rundown:

1) partition new drive

2) create file systems and label 'em

3) mount new partitions somewhere
(say /mnt/new, /mnt/new/boot, /mnt/new/home)

4) rsync -aX --exclude=/mnt/new / /mnt/new (-a for archive mode, -X to
preserve extended attributes, which is important if you use 'em, such as
a system w/selinux enabled)

5) install grub into the mbr on the new disk, which if I recall is just:
# grub
grub> root (hd1,0)
grub> setup (hd1)
(hd1 is the 2nd hd, 0 is the first partition, which is /boot in my case)

Never fails me. Not sure why some sophistibicated tool can't get it
right when just a few cli commands can... ;)



-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com


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