[mythtv-users] What would happen if I cloned a working system disk and put it in another system?

[raphy]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 12:11 PM, John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 12:05 PM, Craig Huff <huffcslists at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Sounds like it is at least worth an attempt.
>>
>> I had thought about using dd, but I can't recall now why I thought
>> there would be a problem with it -- target disk smaller than source
>> disk, perhaps?
>>
> That will be a problem.  I generally have done this method when the
> target was larger than the source.
>
>>
>> All the disks under consideration are plain old IDE, so no worries about SCSI.
>>
>> Calvin- I haven't looked at the man page yet, but I'm guessing
>> grub-install takes care of the MBR issue?  Also, thanks for the
>> pointer about rebuilding the initrd after booting with a rescue disk.
>>
> I believe most of the time the dd will be enough.
>
> John
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I've done this several times. In one case I simply copied everything
from one HD to the other using only cp, and then ran grub on the new
HD. In another case I used dd, and in yet another I used a clone
program that came with the HD itself, something like the maxtor
utility that used (don't know if it still does) to come with maxtor
drives. All of the above methods worked. I found simply using cp
followed by grub to be easiest because I could omit things like the
recording directory.
I had one HD that I was using for a while as a test HD to install new
TV tuners and compile drivers. I was swapping it between three
different computers with drastically different motherboards, and some
had intel, some had AMD processors. In recent times I never had a
problem just sticking a HD in any random box and having it boot. Maybe
a few years ago I found things more finicky because not as many things
were supported in the vanilla kernels. This is mainly with ubuntu that
I'm saying things worked without problems from one system to the next.

The way I set up my frontend was simply by cloning my backend machine
and then disabling the backend startup script and pointing the
frontend to the backend IP. Easy quick frontend setup (or I think it
was at the time ;)

Raphael