I'm with Carl on this. Particularly if you're on a Red Hat-distributed kernel (and it's associated modules), you should have very little trouble.
Are the disks the same size too, or are the new ones a tiny bit larger? If you want them to be truly identical, by far the easiest thing is to follow this procedure: Mount both hard drives on the same system. Boot from a live CD (is that what Knoppix does? I dunno, I know Gentoo will work like a charm). Don't mount either disk. Then run: dd if=[src disk] of=[dest disk] bs=1024 ex: dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=1024 This will copy every byte of data on the src to the dest. Don't think you even need to set the active / bootable flag on the destination boot partition since MBR and all are the same. In this scenarion, _EVERYTHING_ is mirrored, even inode access timestamps are preserved, this can be useful for forensics. The only limitation is that the partitions will not match the natural cylinder boundary. If you're highly dependent on disk performance and the original disk is carefully laid out according to disk zones and their application (nobody I know does this), you might notice. Lots of other approaches, lemme know if you want me to elaborate, you might even get when they're root mounted. : * Create your existing partition sizes using fdisk and use software mirroring to make a duplicate, then break the mirror. Not sure if you want to do this if you got an old linux. This is handy if you want to ultimately end up with mirrored disks, also the more disks you need to copy, the duplication time shrinks exponentially. * The traditional thing to do is to mount everything then 'cp -ax' or 'rsync -av'. On Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 09:05:56PM -0700, Carl Lowenstein ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: Subject: Re: cloning servers Message ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > On 8/8/05, Todd Walton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 8/8/05, Dovber Shapiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I have a few RedHat servers that I want to clone to new machines. > > > > Are they identical machines? Does each have the same exact hardware? > > The installed OS assumes certain hardware, and if you transplant it to > > a new machine with different hardware, it may go schizo. I'm not sure > > how well udev/kudzu would handle this. > > I think you will find that Linux is much more tolerant of hardware > differences than some other unmentionable x86-biased OS's. I have > transplanted a disk from Pentium II to AMD K6-3 with no trouble, > vintage RedHat 7.2. Also more recently from the same K6-3 to Athlon > with no trouble, vintage Fedora 3. Have not tried K6-3 to Pentium 4. > > Much of the hardware discovery process is done at boot time, rather > than being built in when the software is first installed. > > carl > -- > carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > -- > [email protected] > http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
