In the past (with Redhat systems) I have made backups of root filesystems to alternate partitions and booted them.
Typically I after making the alternate FS, I mount it on /mnt/altroot and cd to / and do the following: tar -cplf - | ( cd /mnt/altroot && tar -xvf - ) Then (after adding a stanza in /boot/grub/grub.conf), I boot into the alternate filesystem. This is real useful for being able to do upgrades, and quickly back it out, by just booting into the original FS. Recently I tried this with my Gentoo system and the boot into the copy crash back to the bios after printing "unable to open console device". So I looked at /dev on the alternate root FS. And sure enough it is empty. My kernel is configured with /devfs support. (I think this was a gentoo default with genkernel). I understand, why it is empty, I told tar to stay on the same filesystem. But was does the kernel not populate it when I boot the alternate. Any suggestions on how I can get my alternate root filesystem bootable? When I try this on my GEN -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
