The Fine Art of Making a Bootable Drive
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.
Martin WB5AGZ
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