Upgrade procedure/advice: boot sector

[Don Levey]

On Sun, 2004-05-23 at 09:24, Jeff Vian wrote:
> Don Levey wrote:

> >>Maybe you should rewrite the partiton table on the new drive and then 
> >>copy partiton-by-partition to that drive.
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >That sounds like the next step, I guess.  I may take the time to
> >readjust the partition sizes, at that point.  None of my family actually
> >does work on this machine, so having a large /home doesn't seem to make
> >sense.  However, I've got quite a bit on the web server (family
> >pictures, and all that) as well as the entire CD collection in a media
> >directory.  So /var may grow a bit.  Thanks for the help!
> > -Don
> >
> >  
> >
> One more thought.
> 
> You did not say whether you were reconnecting the second drive (hdb) in 
> as the master (hda) before attempting to boot.  Your copy method makes 
> an exact copy of the original, and it should have the mbr and everything 
> else the same.
> 
> Try removing the original hda drive and putting the second drive in that 
> position and see if it will boot.

That was exactly what I was doing - the idea was to keep the original as
an (untouched) master and do the upgrade on the copy.  That way, if it
worked, I could use the original, and if it didn't I'd still have it to
put back in place.  After the dd I had only one disk connected at a
time.

If the dd should have copied the mbr sector, then there *must* have been
a geometry problem.  I think what I'll do now is connect the second
drive also, manually make partitions, copy over the data from the
master, install a boot loader using either grub-install or grub, and try
to boot that way.  THEN if that works I can upgrade.

I think this has been covered before, but any suggestions for how to
copy, on a partition-by-partition basis, from one drive to another? 
Would that be a good problem for mondo?  And would that take symbolic
links into account?

 -Don