Will this work? Copy boot partition...

[buccaneere]

My LiveCD won't load in the machine that I want to put SuSE in.

I got loaded into ANOTHER machine, and then pulled the harddisk and put it into a USB enclosure. Then, I loaded an old LiveCD on the target machine, plugged in the USB HD, and did a copy command:

cp  /dev/sde2  /dev/sdb3

sd2e was the USB disk partition, sdb3 was the target partition. Both partitions are the same size (target a little larger), and all the files copied over.

Then I copied and pasted the menu.lst entry into my main menu. I had to change some stuff for that:

from:

title openSUSE 11.1
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.7-9-default root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD800BB-75JHC0_WD-WMAM9N652463-part2 resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD800BB-75JHC0_WD-WMAM9N652463-part1 splash=silent showopts vga=0x317
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.7-9-default

to:

title openSUSE 11.1
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.7-9-default root=UUID=8fab092a-3955-4479-807e-156ad5855365 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.7-9-default

but, no boot.

This is fdisk layout...

Disk /dev/sdb: 30.7 GB, 30735581184 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3736 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0006ca0a

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1        3736    30009388+   7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdc: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00022288

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1   *           1        7343    58982616   83  Linux
/dev/sdc2            9448        9729     2265165    5  Extended
/dev/sdc3            7344        9447    16900380   83  Linux
/dev/sdc5            9448        9729     2265133+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

Can this be made to work?

[devils casper]

This will don't work because cp command without any option doesn't preserve permissions. I would suggest you to create an image of partition using PartImage and install it wherever you want.