[YLUG] clone fedora 10

[mike cloaked]

OK if the OP is copying an f10 disk to another yeah you are right
about copying across security contexts as well ...

There have been a number of posts by the same OP about converting up
from FC7 to F10 and I must have been tired as I misunderstood that
this was trying to clone an FC7 disk and making it upgrade to F10..

I guess it will be interesting to see if the report comes back that it works OK.

My best bet for doing an install on a different machine would not be
to copy a hard drive bit for bit and then physically transferring the
drive, but to make a kickstart file and run the install from the DVD
iso using the kickstart file to define what you want in the installed
system.

In fact for all four machines on which I have installed F10 in the
past few weeks the basic install took between 11 and 15 minutes - and
if the machine was plugged in to the ethernet on a DHCP enabled router
then at the end of the install it was already live and ready to
roll.... why anyone would then want to do a disk verbatim copy and
shift it from one machine to another beats me.
All these machines used a copy of the DVD iso already stored on a
non-root partition and used the hard drive install, with the DVD iso
in a specified directory, and the images directory from that drive
stored in the same directory (as is now needed for this kind of
install for F10 and is different to previous Fedora versions in this
regard). I also copy out the vmlinuz and initrd.img files into the
existing /boot/grub and add a grub.conf stanza to initiate the install
from the boot without having to burn a physical DVD.

Once the install is complete to the root partition then I can hook up
the non-root partitions which I always leave as unformatted so that
the original files remain untouched during the install. Any user areas
can be linked back in to the new system ( in fact I have /opt as a
non-root partition and within that /opt/Local/home which I then bind
mount to /home after the install (after mv /home /home.ORIG and mkdir
/home.  That way I can use the newly created user areas in what is now
/home.ORIG and can use any user areas from the original
/opt/Local/home/ as needed.  If they remain unchanged then I copy back
the lines from /etc/passwd /etc/group /etc/shadow and /etc/gshadow for
all the user areas that exist in /opt/Local/home and which now appear
after the bind mount in /home

Starting from initiating the install I get the basic system
operational in about 15 minutes - then change my /etc/yum.repos.d/
files to look at mirrors I want only , and then immediately yum update
- on a system not too long past the release date the number of updates
is usually small and on a reasonable speed connection this update
takes usually less than 20 minutes or so. Then the basic configuring
might take me an hour.  So less than two hours after hitting the first
button I usually have a working system.   I wonder how this compares
with making a verbatim copy of an existing disk and moving it across
to a different machine, plus checking/updating/configuring?   I would
be surprised if it is any better but then I will be happy to be amazed
by your reports of the smaller time taken to do this compared to an
install as I describe above?

Have a good Christmas.

-- 
mike