My mondo adventure

Sherrett O. Walker buznakka at yahoo.com
Mon Oct 3 19:41:32 UTC 2005


Hello, all.

I'm cross-posting this message.

Thanks to some help from a couple of souls on redhat-list at redhat.com, 
I've been able to duplicate my RedHat ES3 installation onto a duplicate 
machine.  I wanted to post my experience and am open to any answers to 
my (sometimes implied) questions.

So, I decided that I was going to use Mondo to archive one of my ES3 
machines and clone it on a different machine.  My machine doesn't have a 
CD-W drive, so I backed up to my hard drive, used scp to copy the files 
to my laptop, and burned them from there.  I put CD 1 in the drive and 
rebooted. 

I had a few... hiccups (is the correct spelling of this really 
hiccough... dictionary.com says both are correct: 
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=hiccough ) along the way.  The 
restoration told me that my hard drive had a gap, and that a total of 
9KB weren't assigned on two different partitions.  Because of this (I 
think), I was unable to do a nuke restoration, and had to go with 
interactive.  I filled the 9KB and kept on my merry way, exchanging 
disks along the way, and rebooted when  it was all said and done.  But 
the BIOS told be I had no boot sector (?). 

So, this took some digging.  I used my Red Hat disk 1 and went to the 
rescue functionality and typed linux rescue at the command prompt.  I 
did 'chroot /mnt/sysimage'  (location of my installation) and 
/sbin/grub-install /dev/sda3 (location of /boot).  I rebooted, only to 
receive a message that the boot process couldn't find the /home 
filesystem.  Some research led me to modify the /etc/mtab file to match 
the source machine's, and then, I got a reboot.  It WORKED!

Questions / Comments:

RTFM
Do it again.
Do it step by step as you work
Stop if you get stuck (or don't know your boot partition) and figure out 
what you've done
Keep a log
Why doesn't mondo just copy all of the boot stuff/ grub.conf file and 
all that?
Why doesn't mondo copy the mtab file?

Thanks for the help, and I wish you well in your mondo adventures.

SOW




More information about the redhat-list mailing list