I have a Debian based machine I need to clone; actually I have 32 so I don't
want go through the install that many times for identical configurations.
I figured it should be pretty easy using dd but I'm running into some
problems I need help with.
I put a blank IDE drive as primary slave in the machine to clone and did:
dd if=hda of=hdb
After about 90 minutes of disk activity it finally finished. I could mount
hdb2 and browse around. Everything looked OK. So I put the just copied disk
in the new machine as primary master. The BIOS saw the disk but gave some
hex numbers and refused to boot. LILO never seemed to start; I assume the
numbers are from the BIOS. I removed the jumper to make the disk primary
slave and tried booting. This time Linux started to boot but gave a kernel
panic trying to mount /. Apparently the boot sequence expects hda (which
makes sense) but configured as slave the disk is hdb and so the partition
wasn't found. I can use the emergency boot disk to boot and it finds and
mounts the partitions just fine when setup as master. I've tried /sbin/lilo
when booted from the floppy but that doesn't help.
Any ideas on:
1) how to make the copy I have now work?
2) a process other than dd that may be faster?
Thanks for any help,
Harley Pebley
