tribulations and success : copy from one drive to another.

[Steve P.]

Greetings fbsders,

I wanted to clone my regular install (source) to a fresh disk (target).
Source and target different size drives, but target big enough.

What I tried:
1. booted the 6.0 386 iso 1 cd with the target drive as the only hd in
the system.
2. put a minimal install there. I wanted to get the slices and
partitions right. Minimal install takes 2 min.
3. put the source drive back on the ata cable as master, and the target
as source.
4. pc would not reboot, even messing with the jumpers, got tired and
lazy, aborted. I was going to dump restore from source to target across
ata drives but no luck.


Next, put the target on a usb cable, so it was read as da0. Source read
as ad0 back on the ata cable.
1. booted the cd as above and re-installed to target again, minimal
install. Now, source and target have the same disklabels.
2. using dump and restore, put the source files onto the target,
mounting the target on the source /mnt. Got some odd warnings and maybe
errors.
3. shutdown, removed source ata drive, leaving usb connected.
4. attempted usb boot. Of course not!
5. removed target drive from usb and put back on ata cable.
6. rebooted and ge golly gosh it worked. dmesg looks clean.

All this so I can test things before I mess with my "prod" system
(source disk).

I will do this again just to make sure I have it down.

Thanks for listening.
Steve.