[ILUG] harddisk swap

[Timothy Murphy]

On Thursday 29 April 2004 17:52, Enda wrote:

> >> I would be very surprised if you could copy the MBR in this way.

> Its perfectly valid to copy the MBR in this way, but the values will
> probably be wrong. If its a lilo boot loader, you'll need to edit the old
> /etc/lilo.conf and point the moutn points to the scsi instead of the ide,
> and write it to the MBR using lilo -C path_to_edited_lilo.conf

What is the point of copying the MBR 
if you then use LILO or grub-install to write it out again?

IMO there is zero probability of an MBR from one disk working on another,
so as I said it seems entirely pointless to copy it.

Of course there is some point in copying the MBR with dd
for later re-copying to the same disk if something goes wrong,
particularly if you are using an obsolete boot loader like LILO.

> >> I would use "cp -a" as you suggest.

> However, I'd recommend using the  r switch too, cp -ar 

On my system (Fedora-1) cp -a already includes -r = --recursive .

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
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s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland