How to copy a Fedora system?

[jdow]

From: "Timothy Murphy" <tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie>

> I've been having problems with a SCSI disk
> (I think it is 8 years old)
> so I decided to copy Fedora-4 to another SCSI disk
> and then upgrade it.
> That way I reckoned I would have a workable system, whatever happened.
> 
> In any case, I copied one system to a partition on the other disk with
> the one-line script:
> 
> rsync -auvz --delete --exclude 'proc/' --exclude 'dev/'
>        --exclude 'sys/' --exclude 'home/' --exclude 'usr/local' 
>        --exclude 'usr/src' --exclude 'opt/' / /mnt/hd/
> 
> Anyway, this caused a problem with /dev ,
> which is really my question.
> It seems that some of the devices in /dev , eg /dev/console ,
> must be set up explicitly.
> When I added "cp -a /dev /mnt/hd" the new system sort of worked,
> but I got a lot of strange messages during the boot.
> 
> Looking around, I guessed that the entries in /dev/.udevdb/
> might have to be created directly,
> but I don't know how one is meant to do this.
> I tried copying over the listed entries with "cp -a"
> but this again worked by not properly.
> 
> So my query is: how exactly should one copy a Fedora system
> to another partition?

Some people speak of using rsync. Some speak of using tar. I tend towards
being funky about it and using dd for the whole source disk and then VERY
carefully hand patching the new disk's boot sector so the correct size
disk is mentioned. Then I can fdisk in new partitions as needed.

{^_-}