Re: copying/cloning root partition

[George Karaolides <george@karaolides.com>]

Hi,

Perhaps, after copying everything, you need to run lilo, as suggested by
the error message you got.

On the regular desktop system, after making your final copy, mount your
finished disk (e.g. under /mnt) and run lilo in the new system:

root@yourmachine:~# mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt
root@yourmachine:~# chroot /mnt /sbin/lilo

Then take the machine out of the desktop machine, put it in the PC104 and
try and see if it boots then.

Best regards,

George Karaolides       8, Costakis Pantelides St.,
tel:   +35 79 68 08 86                   Strovolos,
email: george@karaolides.com       Nicosia CY 2057,
web:   www.karaolides.com      Republic  of Cyprus


On Mon, 5 Nov 2001, Stephen A. Witt wrote:

> I'm trying to figure out how to clone the root partition of a Debian Linux
> installation. The installation is pretty small and hosted on a small,
> PC-104 based system that has only a root partition and runs without swap.
> I would like to be able to "clone" its root partition onto other disks but
> am running into a problem. I installed the disk from the PC-104 system in
> another regular desktop machine and tried to copy the image of the PC-104
> system using:
>
>   # dd bs=512 if=/dev/hdc1  of=disk.image
>
> I then tried to copy this new image onto another disk of the same type as
> running in the PC-104 system using (obviously installed in the desktop
> machine):
>
>   # dd bs=512 if=disk.image of=/dev/hdc1
>
> The partition image gets copied fine, but when I go to boot up this copied
> disk (after being re-installed in one of the PC-104 systems) it doesn't
> finish booting. I see "LIL- " when booting the PC-104 system. This,
> according to the LILO docs indicates that the descriptor table is corrupt,
> caused by a geometry mismatch or by moving /boot/map without running
> /sbin/lilo.
>
> I'm confused by this as it seems that the low level copy with 'dd' should
> copy everything. Any ideas??
>
> Thanks...
>
>
>
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