Timothy Murphy wrote: > Marcelo M. Garcia wrote: > >>> I was thinking of copying the old root partition with >>> sudo cp -a -P /* /mnt/hd > >> I think the command rsync is a better approach for this task. It has >> much more features, for example, you can exclude certain files. > > Thanks for the suggestion. Thanks for all the responses. Further to my query, I'm wondering if one can safely copy partitions (in particular the root partition / ) while the system is running. The reason that I ask is that I'm slightly afraid the machine will not re-boot into single-user mode with the present OS on the sick disk. -- 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