Brett Delport

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Hey all

I need to clone a drive over to a new one. A bit of online browsing suggested using dd to do this. So I did, and it seemed to make the clone succesfully. I then deleted the third partition on the drive, and remade it to take up the additional space. I then set the new drive as master, and removed the source disk (to avoid lilo/fstab confusions with hda and hdb) and it seemed to work fine, everything loads during boot. But just as it gets to the login prompt it reboots.

Does anyone know of a step I missed out, or something that might have gone wrong?

Thanks
Brett

jailbait

If the new drive has a different geometry than the old drive then all kind of fluky errors can occur after a dd copy. When you hit this type of problem the most reliable solution is probably to abandon dd and go through the procedure of partitioning the new drive, formatting the partitions, copying the file systems using cp with the -a option, and installing lilo on the MBR.

If I had to guess a quick and dirty solution to your particular problem I would try to reinstall lilo to the MBR of your new drive.

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Steve Stites

Brett Delport

Hi Steve

Thanks for your help. I think (and I am guessing here) that the problem occured when mounting /home to my 3rd (hda3) partition. This was the partition which I resised, while it was mounted.

Anyway, i redid the operation late last night, using ddrescue (a very nice package for data recovery) instead of dd. Then i booted of a cd, and did the partition resizing while the partitions were not mounted. Worked like a charm, I now have 10 times more free space on my /home partition, which is what I was after.

So, chalk this one up as solved!

Brett