At Thu, 05 May 2011 12:13:18 +0100 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote: > > 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. It sounds like you have problems *other* the 'copy' part. After copying the system, you will likely need to remake the initrd on the target system. Oh, you will need to edit /etc/modprobe.conf: different SATA driver, different ethernet driver, etc. > > 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? It is easy enough to do. There are just a few more things involved besides copying the data and diddling with grub.conf, /etc/fatab, and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. You just forgot about /etc/modprobe.conf and forgot to remake the the initrd. > -- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments