How to copy a Fedora system?

[Jeff Vian]

On Sat, 2006-04-08 at 11:08 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Tim wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 2006-04-07 at 23:12 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> >> So my query is: how exactly should one copy a Fedora system
> >> to another partition?
> > 
> > When I tried it, I used cp with the --preserve=all option.  However, I
> > didn't copy dynamically generated locations (like /dev/ or /proc/).  I
> > just made empty directories on the destination, for the system to
> > populate when it booted.  The only problem I recall was forgetting to
> > set the sticky bit on the new /tmp/ directory.  I don't recall having
> > problems copying "symlinks", either.  They seemed to be copied over as
> > new links.
> 
> That is exactly what I did in my first attempt.
> But the system would not boot -
> I got a warning "unable to open an initial console",
> and nothing appeared on the screen
> from the point where "INIT" normally appears.
> 
> I suppose, thinking about it now,
> the boot could have been continuing,
> without any output to the screen.
> But the effect was that the system hung.
> 
> I created /dev/console, and that took me a little further,
> but the boot failed with various error messages from /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit .
> 
> I copied the whole of /dev (with "cp -a")
> and the system booted, but with a large number of warnings,
> and much too fast - a lot of services did not start up.
> 
> Finally, I just copied over those devices listed in /dev/.udevdb/
> but this had the same effect - the system booted, but not properly.
> 
> I should add a caveat here -
> the point of the exercise in my case
> was that the disk on which the system was running had some errors,
> so it is possible the problems arose from this.
> However, I fsck-ed the new system (while running the old one)
> and there were no errors reported.
> 
The new copy should not have had any filesystem errors, which is what
fsck checks for.  It may, however, have had data errors in some of the
files if the errors existed on the original copy.

> 
> -- 
> Timothy Murphy  
> e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
> tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
> s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
>