Re: Cloned drive won't boot

On Fri, 21 Oct 2005 17:51:03 -0400, fredex wrote:

> My system is currently on a 40 gig drive. I used dd to copy the entire 
> thing to a spare 100 gig drive (spare 100 gig? wowee!). Afterwards, the
> partitions all pass fsck with flying colors, looking at the partition
> table with fdisk I find it looks just like the partition table on the
> "parent" from which it was cloned (which of course it should). the
> first partition is marked bootable.
> 
> but I stick it in as /dev/hda and it won't boot. My motherboard goes
> thru its normal processes, including attempting to boot from cdrom.
> normally, immediately after that GRUB takes over within a fraction of
> a second. But with this cloned drive it just hangs there forever (well,
> I've let it hang for 10-20 minutes, isn't that close enough to forever??).

Enough is enough.

I guess you want to read up a bit on 'booting' and the MBR. But before you
do that, you want to get the problem solved.
Make a grub boot floppy; the 'how-to' is somewhat hidden. If you have
it installed, 'info grub' says everything under topic 'Installation'.
Make it best from your current install according to the instructions. Make sure
you can boot your install from there (it has tab-completion and a basic
command history). Once you are comfortable with it, and you can properly
boot from there, note all details and *install grub from there* ('find
..', 'setup ' etc.; RTFM). It ought to do the job; for me it always does.

Good luck,

Uwe