I’d like to copy everything (RH Linux 7.1, Win 98, boot loader, etc) from my existing (master IDE) hard drive to a new (slave IDE) harddrive. The copy can have identical partition sizes even though the new HD will probably be bigger. Hopefully, I can get Partition Magic or some Linux utility to adjust the partition sizes later.

So, I’d consider it a success if I can copy from one drive to another and after changing the second drive to master, the second drive boots to Linux or Win98.

Ultimately I may want to move to another computer without reinstalling everything. Do you think I could do this? I’d need to install the appropriate drivers in both Linux and Win98 after limping alive with the old wrong ones.

I once experimented with a now forgotten byte by byte copy (one HD to another) command. Could anyone tell me if this is the way to go (including what it is) and what would I input to make sure the boot sector information (ie the HD from beginning to end) gets copied?

I checked this forum for solutions and immediately ran into problems.
For example:
>fdisk -l
Cannot open /dev/hda
Cannot open /dev/hdc

Is there something else I need to know about the ‘fdisk’ command and RedHat Linux 7.1? (I’m still stuck at 7.1 because it just took too long to update and get everything working in the past – I’ll get around to it eventually).

For your info

> dmesg | head -n 1
Linux version 2.4.2-2 (root@porky.devel.redhat.com) (gcc version 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.1 2.96-79)) #1 Sun Apr 8 20:41:30 EDT 2001

You should give fdisk -l a device name,

fdisk -l /dev/hda /dev/hdc