Copying F12 systems between disks
Zbigniew Fiedorowicz
fiedorow at math.ohio-state.edu
Mon Feb 1 19:52:17 UTC 2010
I fell a little behind in updating my Fedora system and was running
Fedora 10 on my laptop until a couple of weeks ago. Then I decided to
try running Fedora 12 off an external USB disk, to make sure that I
wouldn't run into any glitches, in particular that some legacy
applications I compile from source would continue running under F12.
After some tweaking I got everything running smoothly under F12. Since I
didn't want to redo all my tweaking, I tried copying the F12 partition
from the external USB disk to my internal HD with dd. I did this while
running off a live CD with both the external and internal partitions
dismounted. Moreover both partitions had the same size. I then editted
the grub.conf file and /etc/fstab appropriately.
I then rebooted from the internal HD and got a normal grub prompt.
However when the kernel began to boot it quickly restarted back into
BIOS. The only boot message I saw was "Probing EDD", and adding EDD=off
to the kernel parameters didn't help.
I finally managed to accomplish what I wanted by the following steps:
(1)installing a minimal F12 system on my internal HD and updating the kernel
(2)copying the contents of the /boot directory to external storage
(3)overwriting the F12 partition on the internal HD with the one on the
external USB as in the first unsuccessful attempt
(4)deleting the resulting /boot directory and copying the saved /boot
directory from the fresh F12 install in its place.
It appears that there are some subtle differences between installed F12
kernels depending on whether they were installed on the internal HD or
on an external USB.
I remember that I used to able to do a simple partition copy for earlier
Fedora releases and had no problems booting afterwards. Is there any
simpler way to copy a working F12 system to another disk and get another
working system?
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