Upgrade procedure/advice: boot sector

Don Levey fedora-list at the-leveys.us
Sat May 22 17:37:21 UTC 2004


I decided that, given a slow weekend, I would upgrade my personal
mail/web server from RedHat9 to Fedora2.  Wanting to minimise problems,
I did what I hoped would a complete, sector-for-sector copy of the main
disk onto another disk of the same geometry using:
        dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

This seems to have worked.  However, the second hard drive does not
appear to have a boot sector.  That is, when I try to boot from it I get
messages saying that I am unable to do so (I'd get the exact message,
but I need the old disk up right now so I can send this message...).

I figured that I simply needed to install the boot loader, and found
some instructions for installing grub at 
        http://geodsoft.com/howto/dualboot/grub.htm
Basically, this involved booting to a rescue CD, running grub, finding
the stage1 file to confirm the device/partition, running the 'root'
command, and then 'setup'.  This looked like it had succeeded.

However, I still can't boot from the disk.  All the files seem to be
there; that is, the copy looks like it succeeded.

Should I:
1) Just boot to the Fedora CDs and run the upgrade?  Would this install
the boot loader for me? Or...
2) Work harder at getting the new disk to boot first, and then do the
upgrade?

Thanks in advance,
 -Don 





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