Re: The Fine Art of Making a Bootable Drive
On 08/03/2014 03:45 PM, Martin G. McCormick wrote:
> I thought I had a pretty good idea how to do this but I
> obviously am missing something.
> I am replacing a nearly 20-year-old 10 GB conventional
> hard drive with a slightly-larger flash drive for / on a
> Debian-squeeze system; / on flash as it were. I know this can
> work as I have an older version of debian on another box that
> has been doing this now for a couple of years and running just
> fine.
> On that system, I used dd to copy everything including
> the boot sector from that 10-GB drive to the new 16-GB flash
> drive. At that point, I had a 10-GB flash copy of every byte
> that had been on the electromechanical drive. I then resized the
> #1 partition to take advantage of the larger new disk and it
> ultimately worked but this can be done without quite so many steps.
> I used fdisk to format a brand new 16 GB flash drive
> such that Partition 1 is a bit over 14 GB and the rest is
> Logical Partition 5 and called swap. Partition 1 is marked as
> bootable but, at the time, I did nothing about a boot sector. I
> then used rsync and told it to copy devices which it appears to
> have done. It copied devices, /proc and /sys and I ended up with
> the new drive looking just like the old one except for being 6
> GB larger.
> For the boot sector, I copied the first 446 bytes of the
> boot sector on the old drive as in
> the following example I lifted from a Google search if the two
> drives are different capacities:
>
> Copy MBR only of a hard drive:
> dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=446 count=1
>
> The last 64 bits of the 512 mbr contain partition
> information and this is where I may be all wet. I thought the
> disk-copy process took care of that but if not, this is why my
> new disk just sits there when it is installed. The old disk
> boots with no problem.
> There appear to be no hardware issues involved, here.
> The new drive is a SATA flash drive connected to an IDE to SATA
> converter. The little master jumper is set right and as I said,
> another system uses an identical hardware setup with no issues.
> Finally, this particular Dell mother board gives you two
> high-pitched beeps any time it is unhappy about hardware. It
> gives the beeps if the master drive is not set to be the master
> or is missing. In this case, it gives no beeps but also never
> boots. Do I need to set the top 64 bits of the boot sector? If
> so, how? Thank you.
Hi Marting,
I do something very simple when I have to replace my HDD and I hope this
will help you too.
The steps are:
- on live/old machine mount your new device like new HDD or flash drive
- copy all files on root file system to your new device like - cp -dpRx
/ /mnt
- detach your old disk(s) or attach your new device to another computer
you want
- start Debian CD in rescue mode and mount new root partition. Start
shell and do the following tasks
- fix /etc/fstab entries to point to correct device names
- install boot loader. In case of grub-pc I do
- update-initramfs -u
- grub-mkdevicemap
- update-grub
- grub-install /dev/sdXXX
HTH
Georgi
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