Re: [PLUG] copying a complete system to new HD

[Jason Staloff <jasons@dca.net>]

Summing up...

I think Sandhitsu's suggestion to cp /dev/hda1 /dev/hdb ought to be totally safe in terms of permissions and special files. I think you'd have to fsck manually though, since the superblocks would not be consistent with the partition map. It also requires the destination partition to be at least as large as the source. I'm actually moving my system to a *smaller* partition.

Ghost looks cool, but I don't have anything here running Windows. 

MAKEDEV does not appear to be able to create the device files anywhere but /dev. The place where I need them wouldn't show up in that location unless I boot from that drive, which I can't till I have the Right Stuff in /dev...

In the end I just used tar.

Thanks!

Jason


On Wed, 5 Jul 2000, Bill Jonas wrote:

> On Wed, 5 Jul 2000, Jason Staloff wrote:
> 
> >When I copy everything but /dev to the new drive and try to boot, it
> >starts to boot off the drive but it's unable to initialize a console.
> 
> That's to be expected if there's no /dev/ directory with the proper
> device files in it, since Un*x represents everything as a file.
> 
> >Tar seems to work: I just tried it on my notebook and I got an archive
> >with my /dev in it. I'll try it on the new drive when I get home.
> 
> It seems to work for me:
> bj@morpheus:/$ sudo mkdir newdev
> bj@morpheus:/$ sudo cp -a /dev/ /newdev/
> bj@morpheus:/$ diff <(ls /dev/) <(ls /newdev/dev/)
> bj@morpheus:/$
> 
> Doing an 'ls -l' in place of the simple 'ls' in the above sequence only
> shows differences in the modification times of symbolic links.
> 
> I noticed that you said you were using 'cp -pdr'... note that the case
> of the R is quite important WRT this.  Here's a snippet from the cp man
> page:
> 
>        -r     copy recursively, non-directories as files WARNING:
>               use -R instead when you might copy special files
>               like FIFOs or /dev/zero
> 
> Also note that there is generally a /dev/MAKEDEV script which will
> create the device files properly for you (but it takes options, and I
> can't advise since I've not used it; it might also be distribution
> dependent, but I'm not sure).
> 
> Note, though, that your use of 'cp -a' is dependent upon you having a
> copy of GNU cp on the system on which you're working.  'cd ... && tar
> ...' is rather Un*x-independent.
> 
> Bill
> -- 
> >Ever heard of .cshrc?             | "Linux means never having to delete
> That's a city in Bosnia. Right?    |  your love mail." -- Don Marti
> (Discussion in comp.os.linux.misc  |  http://www.billjonas.com/
> on the intuitiveness of commands.) |  http://www.harrybrowne.org/
> 
> 
> 
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