Unable to boot cloned disk

[Sam Varshavchik]

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.

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