Re: disk duplication question

[David Wright <d.wright@open.ac.uk>]

Quoting Stuart Marshall (stuart@igpp.ucllnl.org):

>   sfdisk to partition the new drive;
>   mke2fs to make file systems on the new drive;
>   mkswap to initialize the swap area on the new drive;
>   cd old-partition; find . -mount | cpio -pdm /new-partition
                                            ^
For what it's worth, I add "a" so I can still tell which files
I haven't accessed for a long time.

> But then to finish it seems I need to boot the new computer
> (after installing the new drive) with a boot floppy and
> run lilo by hand.
> 
> Is there some way to also install the stuff that lilo does
> on the new drive?  The new machines will not usually have
> a floppy so I would like to avoid that step.

I won't get a chance to test this until I upgrade another disk,
but you should be able to use the -r option to set the root
partition appropriately for the new drive, and the -C option
to specify a special configuration file. The latter means that
you can write the /etc/lilo.conf on the new disk as it needs to be
in the future system (like you do for /etc/fstab), containing the
future boot= and root= lines, whereas you need to run lilo now on
a file containing boot= and root= with the current device names.

Cheers,

-- 
Email:  d.wright@open.ac.uk   Tel: +44 1908 653 739  Fax: +44 1908 655 151
Snail:  David Wright, Earth Science Dept., Milton Keynes, England, MK7 6AA
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