From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Oct 14 21:22:15 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2150E106566C for ; Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:22:15 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from af.gourmet@videotron.ca) Received: from relais.videotron.ca (relais.videotron.ca [24.201.245.36]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F01738FC1C for ; Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:22:14 +0000 (UTC) MIME-version: 1.0 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Received: from [192.168.0.51] ([96.21.103.185]) by VL-MH-MR002.ip.videotron.ca (Sun Java(tm) System Messaging Server 6.3-4.01 (built Aug 3 2007; 32bit)) with ESMTP id <0KRI00HIBWOKLZ00@VL-MH-MR002.ip.videotron.ca> for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:21:57 -0400 (EDT) Message-id: <4AD640F5.20303@videotron.ca> Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:21:57 -0400 From: PJ User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (Windows/20090812) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, Polytropon , Manolis Kiagias Cc: Subject: clone-dump-restore X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:22:15 -0000 Gentlemen, I have not had a chance to thank you for your very helpful suggestions. I have tried to follow them as well as possible and I cerainly am grateful for your input. It has taken me some time to prepare for a cloning of an existing 7.2 sytem. Now that I have everything running smoothly with all the proggies & configurations the way I want them, I tried (notice - tried) to clone the system. Here's the setup: FBSD 7.2 on ad4 and same on ad12. First, running on ad4, I tried to dump & restore each partition directly: ad12s1a to da0s1a (usb sata disk). No go. I had set it up originally with livefs, minimal; then redid it all with fdisk, bsdlabel and nwfs; then dump -0af - /dev/ad12s1a | restore -rf - /dev/da0s1a --- got error messages about not being a tape device. Great. Next, I tried with another usb/sata disk on da0... dumped to files (dump went w/out problems) ... mounted da0 partitions 1 x 1 to /mnt, cd'd to /mnt and did restore -rf file. Only the ad12s1f(usr) restore gave long list of "unable to create file or link or something like that". When I then installed the restored disk to another computer (identical except for CPU (3gb instead of 2.4gb), booted from the restored disk and saw that it was trying to boot from ad12s1a which doesn't exist on the new machine. uh...oh... Somehow I think I may not have understood something. Perhaps I should install the disk directly in the dump/restore machine and try again. Oh, yes, another sign from the gods... when restoring to a partition just newfsed there is a warning that .snap is already installed... now what on earth or moon is that? I will try again... and try to document more clearly... :-( TIA