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Going upon the success of cloning my workstation’s drive, I set out to clone my server’s drive last night. I was doing a bit of a multiple swap, basically. I took a storage drive out of the file server, it having now been made unnecessary due to the new array, I then cloned using ‘dd’ my workstation’s drive onto it. The next step was to reuse the workstation’s old drive as the OS drive of the file server, taking its 17.2GB drive out.

Unfortunately it isn’t quite so simple as cloning when it comes to that upgrade procedure, because the drives aren’t the same size, geometry, etc. While there is a method of using ‘dd’ to clone then resize, I figured with ext3 filesystems, it’d be better to use the cpio copying method. This took a while, but not nearly as long as the previous clone… it was just much more manual; I had to create all the partitions and format the filesystems before I’d start the copy.

I then made a blunder… though, thankfully not too terrible. Bad things can happen when you type the wrong device in a command… especially when that command creates the new filesystem. Instead of formatting the boot partition on the new drive, I mistakenly formatted the old drive, therefore wiping out any way to actually boot the file server.

Thankfully that happened with the boot partition though, instead of the root or home partitions. I was able to copy a kernel back over, reboot and reconnect the workstation drive, copy the bootloader stuff over, shutdown, reconnect the drive into the server, started it… then “Error 15″ and it wouldn’t boot.

Now, what the hell, right? I remembered to ‘dd’ the MBR, the grub.conf and all the files were there… I just couldn’t understand why it wasn’t booting. So… swap around the monitor again, downloaded a gentoo cd, burned that… fiddled and fiddled some more, again without success. I finally remembered how to chroot into the existing install and re-ran the grub installer, bingo… I don’t know why it wasn’t working, but that solved the problem, so YAY!

All that drive moving insanity is now complete!