F9: Mounting of drives

[Dan Thurman]

Tim wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 19:48 -0700, Dan Thurman wrote:
> > Yes, I did.  I tried all 7 Sata ports and they all behaved the same
> > way.  This blew me away.  Perhaps Sata ports have no unique
> > position identifier, such as "I am Sata port #1", ... ?
>
> On someone else's PC, I noticed that there did seem to be some order to
> which port was first.  But I wonder if your problem is down to something
> like:
>
> One of the drives is ready first (Fedora 9 seems quite slow at scanning
> devices, and spews out numerous errors in the meantime - at least it's
> slow to boot up, and theres lots of dev errors when you plug in USB
> drives post-boot).
>
> One of the drive partitions is set up to be "bootable" and the other
> not, and that affecting which is first.
>
Ok, I have to retract what I said about testing all 7 sata ports.  It 
turns out
that there is precedence on which port is recognized first.  I have 
mis-tested
this.  I am able to find the first sata port on my Intel board and it 
does keep
my primary drive as /dev/sda and my cloned drive as /dev/sdb.  I am so
happy now!

Now, the problem I have is the cloned drive was not successful with the
dd command.  It failed to create the swap partition and it failed to 
faithfully
create the / partition.

So it looks like I will have to discover a way to copy clone the 
partition of
/.  How can I do this safely?  cp -a?

What I do not want to do is to copy over from /, the devices for example
so what is the best method for copying over the partitions esp. that of / ?

I think /boot is not a problem with cp -a but I have a feeling / is 
significant.

Please advise?

Thanks!
Dan