[CentOS] How to copy a system?

Timothy Murphy

gayleard at eircom.net
Thu May 5 11:13:18 UTC 2011


Is there a standard way of copying a working system
from one machine to another with different partitions?

I have two CentOS-5.6 machines, say A and B,
and I thought I would copy / on sdb10 on machine A
to an unused partition sda7 on machine B with rsync.
I made the appropriate changes to /etc/fstab and grub.conf ,
as well as /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts ,
but found that there were innumerable errors
when I booted machine B into the new system,
mostly to do with creating dev's.
Also the ethernet connection, which had been eth1 on A,
was now eth0 on B, and this did not work.

This was only a kind of experiment.
There is a problem with the partition table on machine A,
and I thought it would be useful to have a backup machine
with exactly the same setup.

Is this a hopeless enterprise, or can it be done easily?
 
-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland




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