[CentOS] Three Identical systems - short cut to setting up the drives?

On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 3:28 PM, William L. Maltby
<CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com> wrote:
> He is trying to copy an existing install, transport the drive and boot.
> Until he gets a boot that allows the new root to be detected *as* the
> new root, I don't know if that would work.

You can actually do that by using "chroot" from a rescue CD. I usually
want to do that on my systems, when I clone from a machine with
hardware RAID to a machine on which I will use software RAID. After
copying the image (using dd or whatever), I mount the partitions under
/mnt/sysimage and /mnt/sysimage/boot, then I do a chroot
/mnt/sysimage, and then I do mkinitrd, using -f to overwrite the old
one and specifying the exact version of the kernel grub is configured
to boot with.

For adding/removing drivers, mkinitrd works like a charm. For renaming
VGs, I don't know if it would detect them right. As it is on the
destination machine, I'm guessing it would, but as I didn't really
test it, I cannot be sure.

Anyway, if you get to it and test mkinitrd to correct the name of the
VGs inside initrd and it works, let us know!

Thanks,
Filipe