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? -- Timothy Murphy e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland