On Monday 24 April 2006 17:43, Phil Schaffner wrote:
Can do it with tar (or cpio or cp -aux).
The OP asked about image copying. In a full image copy, with the assumption that the source disk is removed prior to the reboot with the new disk, one doesn't have to worry about label dupes and such.
I've found a dd of the whole disk to an identical disk works very well, with caveats.
and rebooted. Came right up. Note that the rescue CD does need to be the same major kernel version as the system.
and have appropriate version of mkinitrd.
Yes, this is very true.
The above apparently assumes you are using the same labels on the source and destination disks. If so, you must remove the original disk before attempting a reboot or problems with duplicate labels will ensue.
Removal of the source was assumed; sorry I didn't make that explicit. It vastly simplifies things if you do an image copy and remove the source drive before proceeding.
I did this once going the other way, from an IDE disk to a SCSI disk. It worked fine, but was a little tedious.
Have done it both ways, and with/without LVM. Always a bit tedious but workable. Major problems (except for potential errors editing fstab and grub.conf) tend to be with initrd and grub/BIOS device ordering.
Your instructions were complete, and have great information. And for cases where you might want to go to a different sized drive or use different filesystem sizes this is a good way to go; I use Paragon Partition Manager for many tasks, but resizing SELinux labeled ext3 filesystems is not one of them. For a straight clone and for NTFS and FAT Paragon works great (and the rescue CD version is a bootable Linux CD with the Partition Manager GUI app running on a 2.4.x kernel).
But it is quite a bit simpler to image the disk (either with imaging hardware or software, although a SCSI-> IDE clone would likely be software-only) and remove the source, once the proper edits have been made using the rescue disk. GNU parted and its frontends can do this as well.