I have successful tar an existing CentOS 5.2 partition from Fefora10.
The idea is to move a working CentOS 5.2 residing in an internal hard drive to a portable hard drive.

I know how to edit a stencil in menu.lst to boot the clone CentOS5.2.
During boot, I encountered


Strangely enough, I was able to clone a working ubuntu 8.04 in a portable hard drive without this problem.

What could go wrong ?
Since I have all the files as the old CentOS 5.2 system, nothing should go wrong. Of course, I need to
edit /etc/fstab of the new cloned system and /boot/grub/menu.lst.


For Fedora 10 case:
During boot time,

It says

As I have found out now, replicating/cloning an OS and booting from an internal hard drive was easy and smooth,
but not with with an external drive, even though the SAME steps are taken.

My theory is that when I am trying to boot up an OS from an external drive,
the /dev/hda or /dev/hdb or /dev/sda or /dev/sdb is causing unforseeen
confusion to the kernel and thus it is causing mounting /dev/ to fail .

It is very interesting to find out ubuntu 8.04 does not get confused.
If fact, /dev/sdb is used for the external drive and /dev/sda=internal-drive is not mounted (one would tend to think /dev/sda
is the ACTIVE hard drive, not so for ubuntu! It pays to experiment with non-RedHat distros).

I have no solution to my problem right now.

That sounds like (lack of) support in the initrd.

For reference, see a similar post :
http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/...20973&forum=38

For now, unless someone can guide me through it, I won't mess with this issue.