Unable to boot cloned disk

Markus Kesaromous remotestar at live.com
Fri Jun 19 03:29:46 UTC 2009


> From: mrsam at courier-mta.com
> To: fedora-list at redhat.com
> Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:17:06 -0400
> Subject: Re: Unable to boot cloned disk
> 
> Markus Kesaromous writes:
> 
> > On my workstation, with FC9, I attached a second drive, identical to the 
> > linux boot drive.
> > Both drives are SATA.
> > The linux boot drive is a dual boot of windows XP and FC9.
> > 
> > In single user mode, I cloned sda to sdb
> > 
> > dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32M
> > 
> > I shut down and remove the second drive and insert it into
> > another workstation.
> > 
> > Booting the second workstation fails because it cannot find
> > /dev/root, among other things, and the kernel panics.
> > 
> > Repeating the cloning does not seem to have any effect.
> > 
> > This effectively says that an OEM cannot have a master disk to 
> > clone disks off of it for use in other machines.
> 
> Of course an OEM can. I see no reason why not.
> 
> > Any ideas how to properly clone fedora disks so that they are bootable
> > on other machines?
> 
> For starters, investigate what exactly "among other things" is. The kernel's 
> inability to find /dev/root is a direct result of previous errors. It's the 
> symptom, but not the cause, of a boot failure.
> 
> Even though both drives are SATA drives, they may have different geometry, 
> so a sector-by sector copy will result in a somewhat scrambled drive.
> 
> Generally, OEMs clone identical drives. Same make and model, same geometry.
> 
> Furthermore, drives do not get cloned while the machine is actually booted 
> off the drive, and the partitions are mounted. In the best case, booting 
> the cloned drive will result in a fsck, and possibly some lost files. 
> Generally, when OEM clone drives, they boot off a separate drive, in order 
> to clone a given drive.
> 

The drives are identical (i.e. make and model)



I will try to clone the drives using a live cd. Will report back later.


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