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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