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