Hi,

I am using dd to clone a CentOS 5 physical server with the command:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sdb

When booting the cloned drive, I am getting the error:
mount: could not find filesystem /dev/root

Anything special I should be using with the dd command, or should I be using a different method to clone the disk?
The server is from 10 years ago and the disk I am trying to clone it to a disk that is a lot newer (if that makes a difference).

Thanks in advance

Once you have cloned the drive, you might need to adjust the grub configuration on that new drive so that it is not looking for the original drive.

More detail about what you are trying to accomplish may be critical.

Are you moving it to a new hardware platform?
Do you have a rescue CentOS-5 media on USB or CD? If so, that might be used to correct that drive.

Also, you should boot from a Live disk before cloning a disk that has a bootable OS on it. Else you would get errors when booting from the copy as some of the files could have changed during the copy. If the copy is connected to the same computer as the original disk, then you might have a conflict as the UUID of the partitions on both drives will be the same. You can try changing it: https://www.tecmint.com/change-uuid-...tion-in-linux/

dd is useful for exact to exact. It is not really good for other uses.

I might be tempted to use clonezilla or other cloning tool that can check for data.

Be sure you don't mess up which is which on this.

Once cloned you may have to fix sizes like partition sizes. Remember that some older stuff can't use some CHS numbers and drive sizes.

Be sure to boot the cloned in same situation as original as in remove original and swap this clone.

I would use CLONEZILLA (the tool MADE for this purpose) to image the drive to remote storage. Boot a USB device or CD with a CLONEZILLA distro image on it so your source drive is totally idle and unmounted.

Once this is done, you can use the same CD/USB to restore that remote image to one or more different devices or drives.

I have used this concept to clone a prime server to create an entire server farm (although for that use it was less than simple). Beware of changing/duplicating UUID or labels, and you may have to do a GRUB recovery on the resulting drives.

Hi All,

Thanks for the input.
The disks are lvm, so /etc/fstab does not identify them with uids.
Would I still need to update the uids elsewhere?
I am not moving the disks to new hardware.

Thanks

did you try to dd (copy) your living system?
how did you try to boot the second drive?

One disk, or an array?
Are the new disks same type (sata, other, etc)?
Are the new disks in same metal hardware?