On Sat, 2004-05-22 at 23:58, Jeff Vian wrote: > Don Levey wrote: > > >I decided that, given a slow weekend, I would upgrade my personal > >mail/web server from RedHat9 to Fedora2. Wanting to minimise problems, > >I did what I hoped would a complete, sector-for-sector copy of the main > >disk onto another disk of the same geometry using: > > dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb > > > > > > > This may be because you said you did a "sector-for-sector copy of the > main disk onto another disk of the same geometry using: dd if=/dev/hda > of=/dev/hdb" > This should always work *IF AND ONLY IF* the drives are exactly the same > geometry. That means same physical construciton, and even same make, > model, (and maybe even same firmware levels). If the geometry is not > exactly the same it *MAY* work. > What you in effect have done is create an exact *byte-for-byte* copy of > the drive, including boot sector, partiton table, and even the otherwise > inaccessible data that handles LBA mapping, etc. If this changed > information happens to be incompatible with the new hardware it can > fail; particularly if the boot sector is not where the drive firmware > expects it to be. > Well, they both *say* that they're the same. It's certainly the same model and manufacturer, but I guess they could have changed the internal geometry even if the numbers match up. > I assume from what you have said, that the drive is accessible in all > ways /except that it will not boot/. As such I would suspect a > geometry problem that confuses the drive firmware during boot and before > Linux gets loaded. > I was just thinking: " I'm curious, though - would this explain being able to access other files on the disk *except* the boot?" so I guess the answer would be "yes." > >Should I: > >1) Just boot to the Fedora CDs and run the upgrade? Would this install > >the boot loader for me? Or... > >2) Work harder at getting the new disk to boot first, and then do the > >upgrade? > > > > > 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
