Am 31. Jan, 2005 schwätzte Michael so:

> Is it possible under Linux to copy, mirror, .iso a hard drive to a hard
> drive and do so to a bootable state? I have a friend who would like to
> copy  (Norton Ghost)  a drive to another under Linux, but I am unsure
> how to do this as I have always installed to a drive.

For GNU/Linux ( and probably most *NIXen ) this works quite well.

Make a partition on the new drive big enough to hold the old drive and use
dd. Not the best way, but it works if neither partition is mounted.

dd if=/dev/$oldpartition of=/dev/$newpartition

Hmm, there are some projects for this, but I can't figure out what they
are.

Here are notes I'm using for a similar process for copying to many similar
boxen. I'm using tar to make the copies. --atime-preserve is an important
option for the process. They weren't meant for someone else to read, but
if you wait for me to fix them up it'll be several days if not several
weeks, so you get the raw notes now :).

###
partitioned new drive:
        linux partition first, making it a primary partition and giving it
most of the drive and leaving about 128MB for swap
        swap as a primary partition as well, giving it the rest of the
drive
        change type for swap partition to be swap
        marked linux partition as bootable
mkfs.ext3 on linux partition
        mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1
mkswap on swap partition
        mkswap /dev/sda2
mount linux partition
        mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb0
if copying to multiple partitions have them all mounted up prior to the
copy
if copying from multiple partitions reuse the below and adjust for the
secondary partitions
        cd /; tar -cf - --exclude="./home/*" --exclude="./tmp/*"
--exclude="./var/tmp/*"--exclude="./var/run/*" --atime-preserve -l . | tar
-xf - -C /media/usb0/ 2>&1 | tee /tmp/tar.out
there might be a couple of warnings about not copying sockets, but they
can be ignored
use '.' rather than '*' in conjunction with '-l' for tar to avoid picking
up secondary partitions
space used on old and new partitions should be about the same
need to copy /.dev to the new dev dir
        cp -pr /media/usb0/.dev/* /media/usb0/dev/
fsck the new partition? Haven't been doing this.
        e2fsck -y /dev/sda1
fix new fstab if necessary
install grub in boot partition
        grub-install --recheck --root-directory=/media/usb0 /dev/sda
###

I've done this type of thing many times in the past with GNU/Linux
systems. Up until the udev issue I mentioned on the last week this has
always worked quite well.

Another trick is necessary if he's copying the boot drive and using lilo.

ciao,

der.hans
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