jb701@uku.co.uk wrote: > I have Debian sarge loaded and running fine on a Thinkpad (laptop). I now > want to copy my setup onto another hard drive, so I can try some things out > without ruining this setup (which took a lot of effort to get running). > How do I go about doing that? The laptop can only run one hard drive at a > time. I can connect to another Debian machine (running woody). The laptop > started with woody (same CDs used as the other machine) and I think I kept > all the downloaded deb files used to upgrade. Is there any way to copy the > setup rather than setting up a new hard drive from scratch? I do that all of the time. It is my preferred install method. I boot a live cd image. The only real requirement is to get both machines on a network at the same time. Use either Knoppix or DFS or whatever to boot the new machine. Partition the drives as you wish them to be partitioned. Then mount them. Here is a quick synopsis. You will need to customize for your purposes. But this should be enough to get the idea. mkfs -t reiserfs /dev/hda5 mkdir /target mount /dev/hda5 /target Then rsync the entire system from the original laptop to the new laptop. A command like this: rsync -av --numeric-ids --exclude /proc --exclude /sys root@orig:/ /target/ That will use 'ssh' to connect and copy the entire other system to the new system. We excluded /proc and /sys in the copy. Make sure to create those directories. When that is done you can reboot into the new system. The trick is to get the new system booted. You can do this many ways. I prefer grub. This is where the DFS bootable live image is nice. It has a grub loader. Tell grub to boot the other disk. Then install grub from the running system on the main disk. Assuming DFS and grub, use the DFS disk to boot from cdrom and then use it to boot to the system on the hard drive that you just copied over there. Example: root (hd0,4) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.8-10-686 root=/dev/hda5 ro initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.8-10-686 boot Of course the version numbers and partition numbers must match your systems. After booting run 'grub-install /dev/hda' and you should be set. I have done this many times and it works quite well. Of course this is all from memory and I fear I may have forgotten something in recalling it here. Bob
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