[NTLUG:Discuss] drive copy continued

[brian@pongonova.net]

On Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 02:46:30PM -0600, Raymond Norton wrote:
> I have an IPCop box customized to fit our needs.
> I now want to make copies of it for some of our schools.
> The source drive is 10 Gigs, and the target is 3.5 G
> The data is only about 100 MB.
> 
> I did a disk to disk clone, and all 4 partitions showed up. It seemed to
> run successfully, although I never did see it reference partition 1 & 2
> during the copy, but 3 & 4 showed up quite a bit.

Do you mean the four partitions on the 10G drive showed up on the 3.5G drive?  And
were all 4 partitions <= 3.5G?  If, together, they were greater than 3.5G, then
something got left behind...

Seems somewhat dangerous to me, copying 10G partition tables onto 3.5G drives.
Ghost might be easy to use, but do *you* really know what went on during the copy?

The only *safe* way to do this would be to set up partitions on the 3.5G drive
(using fdisk or some other lesser utility), format them, mount them, and then do a
file copy from the 10G to 3.5G drive (using tar or cpio).  

But if you're really set on using Ghost, I'd suggest running 'fdisk -l' on each
disk, and then comparing the partition tables.  I would also bet that based on
this... 

> I mounted it in the PC, but I get a controller error, or non system disk. A
> couple people on the list commented they used ghost and had to run Lilo to
> get it to boot the first time.

...the root partition on the new drive isn't configured as bootable.  
It'll show up something like this under fdisk:

   Device Boot    Start      End   Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1      196   395104+   6  DOS 16-bit >=32M
          ^^^^^
> Any advise would be appreciated.

My advice is to ditch Ghost and perform the operations manually.  That way, you'll be
absolutely sure what goes where.  There might be some time up front needed to look
over the man pages for fdisk, mke2fs, etc., but at least when you're through,
you'll know exactly what you did.  

  --Brian