Hello.

I'm using Fedora 18.

I'd like to clone my running boot partition to another (mounted or unmounted) partition on the same physical drive. I have a lovely install at the moment, and I'd like to take a 'snapshot', so to speak.

I've been researching this, and dd seems the preferred method, but I've noted problems in reported first-hand experiences when cloning an operational boot 'drive' using dd.

Is this a non-starter, and I should simply suck-it-up and boot from a live CD (or equivalent) to perform this operation? Or is there an option I haven't encountered in my searches?

Thanks in advance for any and all help, or suggestions. It is appreciated.

Edit: I noticed a very similar question to mine just a few posts below. I am extremely embarrassed about that. Though particulars of my situation appear different.

The partition type of my boot partition is 'Linux LVM'. I formatted this partition as EXT4 before installing Fedora.

I prepped the clone-to partition in the same manner: I formatted as EXT4 and used LVM as the partition type. This seems contradictory to the advice below.

Sorry. I admit to being confused.

If you clone one partition to another the target partition will be erased. I don't think it is possible to clone to a mounted partitions, such operations are normally done with unmounted partitions.
LVM if you don't know is Logical Volume Manager, it has a different way to deal with partition in a disk and it is a good idea to understand that better before mess with it.

My suggestion is to use Clonezilla and to use a different disk as target to clone your partitions.
You don't want to mess that up do you?

Regards

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you so much for the response, ukiuki.

I did some thinking about it after posting, and it seems to me that cloning to a different drive is solid advice. In fact, this would solve a number of problems as I would like to have this install running from an internal drive rather than from a partition on an external disk as it is currently, and I might as well just tame two birds with one bowl of millet.

I admit I was using the idea behind this post as a 'test' for my final motive. I also admit to being corrupted by my use of Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper under OS X which makes cloning drives, partitions, etc. as easy as pie.

Thanks so much, again.

Glad to help, let us know how that goes, normally with clonezilla everything goes just fine, I dont think you'll have any problems.

Regards

The thing to remember about using a cloning approach is that it requires that the target has the same HW as the src, as you're copying the mbr, kernel & device drivers.

Thank you for the concern, chrism01.

My goal is move this install from a partition on an external disk onto an internal drive. The install will be booting the same machine, so I am assuming all will be well as long as the bits are intact and in their proper place.

I think I'll probably just go with dd as it has worked well for me in the past.