[SOLVED] Cloning a hard drive

[EdN]

I cloned a Fedora 12 hard drive to a new hard drive using Seagate DiscWizard. Everything appeared to go well. However the new hard drive will not boot. How do I make it bootable?

[oz]

I'm just guessing here as I've never used that application, but maybe the bootloader didn't get written to the MBR. If that's the case, you could try reinstalling GRUB using SuperGRUB or some other bootloader tool.

[devils casper]

You have to re-install GRUB.
Boot up in Rescue Mode using Fedora Installation CD/DVD. Execute this at shell prompt :

chroot /mnt/sysimage
grub-install /dev/sda
exit
exit

[floydsmith]

If your cloning software is working correctly and cloneed an old drivie onto to a new hard drive, then it should have exactly cloned your (old) disk. That means you you should not have to reinstall grub or the MBR (if you cloned the either the entire disk or the partition that had grub on it AND the MBR) (this is, normally the 1st primary disk /dev/sda (also called drive C: in windows). So, assuming that is the case, you must remember that after the cloning, you must make the cloned disk BECOME (phisically) /dev/sda (and the old one become /dev/sdb (drive D. You do this by reversing the jumpers on the two disks (that is, the 2nd becomes the 1st, the 1st becomes the second). If you cloned a patition on a disk onto a new partition of the SAME (old) disk, then you will have to reinstall grub (which will also fix the MBR problem).
Floyd,

[Tedderouni]

When you say it won't boot, do you mean you don't even get to grub, or do you get to grub and then it fails after getting past grub?

If you can see the contents of the new drive, while booted to the old drive or a livecd or something, see if grub is present on the new drive. It should be in /boot/grub. If you used the default settings, /boot will probably have its own separate small partition.

If it's a SATA drive there are no jumpers, but you might be able to change the drive letters by swapping the port the drive is connected to on your motherboard. (This assumes you have both drives connected. If you want to connect only the new drive, then it should be sda regardless.) Alternately you could manually edit your /boot/grub/grub.conf to make it point to the new drive.

If that doesn't help, if you can access the new drive take a look at the output of

fdisk -l

Compare the new drive to the old drive. Check for the bootable flag on your boot partition - it should have an asterisk in the BOOT column. Sometimes that doesn't get copied when cloning. If it doesn't have it, you can set it using fdisk. This example will make /dev/sda1 bootable - replace with whatever your boot partition is.

# fdisk /dev/sda
Command (m for help): a
Partition number (1-4): 1
Command (m for help): w

If that doesn't work, you may need to reinitialize grub, even if its files got transferred correctly, to rewrite it to the MBR. Here's how, again assuming /dev/sda1 is your desired boot partition - change as necessary.

# grub
grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit

To convert /dev/sd* notation into the notation that grub uses, a=0, b=1, etc, and subtract 1 from the partition number. So sda1 becomes (hd0,0), sdc2 would be (hd2,1) etc.

Hope this helps.

[EdN]

You have to re-install GRUB.
Boot up in Rescue Mode using Fedora Installation CD/DVD. Execute this at shell prompt :

chroot /mnt/sysimage
grub-install /dev/sda
exit
exit

Thanks devils casper and all,
I followed devils casper's advice for re-installing GRUB
and it worked! The only thing different was the drive of
interest was /dev/sdb. I did an fdisk -l to make sure before doing the grub-install.
Perhaps other's methods would also work, so thanks to all
that replied.