I attempted to clone a fully functional IA-32 SL 6.1 system to a new
harddrive of the same storage size as the original;
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
The operation worked, and the cloned drive in the target machine booted,
but two issues emerged.
1. The source and clone platforms had different 802.11 WNICs, the
source Atheros, the clone Intel. The kernel still claimed it had a
non-existant Atheros wlan0 about which it complained and installed the
Intel as wlan1.
2. The shutdown GUI app, whether initiated by the power button on the
physical hardware or via the GUI pull down menu, always would do a
restart even if shutdown was selected. From a regular GUI terminal as
root via su, shutdown now eventually followed by halt worked as
expected. I know that there has been a change in the controlling
hardware and thus software (e.g., acpi, whatever), and the cloned image
clearly was expecting new hardware.
I did a fresh install from the SL 6.1 IA-32 DVD into only / /boot and
/usr, not touching any other partitions not needed for the install, and
now everything appears to work as expected.
In the (distant) past, I recall that the kernel startup did an inventory
of the actual hardware on the platform, and installed the correct
drivers/interfaces for the physical platform upon which the environment
was to run (assuming these were supported by the distribution image --
if not, a manual merry chase over the web had to be made for source
and/or binary RPMs that provided the drivers/interfaces). It appears
that some of these drivers/interfaces are now configured by the original
systems installer (anaconda plus whatever anaconda uses), and not
modified/replaced during startup -- making cloning to slightly different
platforms more difficult. Where/which are the various configuration
files that one needs to modify (I had a fully functional vi and disk
reading/writing capability) so that one can manually force the
environment to use the correct drivers for the hardware platform?
Appropriate document URL(s) will suffice.
Yasha Karant
