I have a Fedora 12 load on a 4GB compact flash. One 200Mb ext2 partition for /boot and the rest of the CF as a single ext4 partition with journalling turned off and other junk to minimize write/erase operations.

The problem is that I am tasked to clone the installation and what I have tried to date is not working.

What I did so far was to use dd to copy off the MBR and the two partitions onto a USB hard drive. Then I get another CF card in place, partition it the same way -- sizes, labels, and fstypes the same, and then dd the contents of the original CF onto the new one, adding the option of oflag=noatime.

It starts to boot, buut then says :


I am trying to do this with simple commands rather than dragging in a utility like Clonezilla.

Can it be done like this or am I going in the wrong direction ?

A clue, please, for this clueless one !

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.
Assuming the CF cards are the same size it should be as easy as
dd if=/dev/sdx of=cf.img (copy from card)
and
dd if=cf.img of=/dev/sdx (copy to card)

Use the actual device ID in place of sdx. You will have an exact byte for byte copy of the CF card.

sorta...
I made 3 image files: one for the boot partition (/dev/sda1) one for the rest of the card (/dev/sda2) and a little one for the MBR (the first 512 bytes of /dev/sda)
I used this reference: how to copy MBR with dd/
but it will not boot.
I should also mention that I edited grub.conf and fstab to use LABEL rather than UUID.