I started to reply to this, but realized as I was going along that there are more pitfalls here than you want to know about. IF you have a good bootdisk, you might be able to do it, but test out every stage of the following procedure first, before you commit. The basic problem is that you have to umount / in order to mount the new partition as /, and you can't do that and have _anything_ else mounted. So:
either get a good SAR disk with the basic utilities, mount, umount, cp, rm, vi, fdisk, e2fsck, mke2fs (and what else?? There are SAR rescue-disk making scripts that are a good thing to have), or trust everything to your bootdisk. Will you bootdisk boot if it doesn't find things where it expects them? It should, but I never tried it. In that case, you can try simply: copying everything in the original distrubution (assuming you have no other partitions mounted, then mount your new partition, /dev/hdb1, say, on a blank directory /foobar/, by mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb1 /foobar and then run cp /* /.* /foobar cp --recursive /usr /var /etc /root /foobar (this should give copies or everything in the standard distribution into /foobar/. I may have forgotten a directory, though). Don't copy /proc. Then, edit your /etc/fstab (and /foobar/etc/fstab) to mount /dev/hdb1 on / instead of whatever partition is there now. Use linux fdisk to mark /dev/hdb1 as bootable I DON"T REALLY KNOW IF THIS WILL WORK. AND I MAY HAVE FORGOTTEN SOMETHING. This _might_ work. You then re-boot using your trusted bootdisk, and you should find your new copy of the distribution mounted on /. You can then re-run lilo (check the lilo.conf file) to get it to boot without a disk. Wait for someone else to tear me apart on this list before you try it. Please, folks, what is wrong with this?? -- David L. Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Mathematics http://www.lehigh.edu/~dlj0/dlj0.html Lehigh University 14 E. Packer Avenue (610) 758-3759 Bethlehem, PA 18015-3174
