Mirroring Linux partition

[omber]

I renamed the topic now that I think I know what the problem is.

When I mirrored my Windows 7 RC1 to another drive the system wouldn't load demanding Win7 installation disk to perform system repair. I think the reason for this is the change in physical hardware on which the system resides (went from old 80GB Maxtor to a newer 500GB Seagate).

I have to mirror a system that has XP and a Linux distro on it. I can fix the XP afterwards with XP installation disc (hopefully it wont try to write different bootloader) but what about Linux - will Linux go insane trying to boot from a different drive than originally installed onto?

 

[Nothinman]

Depends on the version of Linux, most are fine being moved around these days. I can switch the SATA ports/controllers that my home installation is plugged into all day and it'll boot fine.

 

[omber]

Well I am booting up my 3rd system at work - I'm planning to use Acronis True Image to mirror the drive (the system is running from 3rd drive) we'll see how it goes

 

[Nothinman]

If you've got 3rd party drivers like the closed source nVidia drivers and the new machine has an ATI card you'll have to fix that. But all of the free drivers should be fine since most distros do hardware detection early in the boot process in the initrd.

 

[omber]

The source and destination machines are identical except the destination machine has a Hitachi 2.5inch 250GB SATA HDD as well as lacks an optical drive and flash card reader (source machine and drive is WD Caviar 250GB IDE, has IDE DVD-ROM and a card reader).

 

[sourceninja]

I've cloned drives many times to different machines with no issues on ubuntu. The only time I had any problems was with one weird setup.

We had a ubuntu server that was booting from the SAN (I didn't set it up that way). When we migrated san's the UUID of the disk changed and ubuntu would not boot. I had to boot from a liveCD and change the UUID to the new correct id. After that all was well (and I got permission from my boss to get the damn thing off the san like it should be).

 

[Nothinman]

Which is why I prefer LVM volumes or filesystem volume lables over UUIDs.

 

[sourceninja]

Yea, that is a better way. Ubuntu seems to do the UUID thing by default.

 

[omber]

So after mirroring the Ubuntu that is on it starts but GNOME daemon cannot start when it gets to X:

Your session only lasted less than 10 seconds. If you have not logged out yourself, this could mean that there is some installation problem or that you may be out of diskpace. Try logging in with one of the failsafe sessions to see if you can fix this problem.


xlib: extension "Generic Event Extension" missing on display ":0.0".
-- repeats 5 more times --
/etc/gdm/Xsession: Beginning session setup...
/etc/gdm/Xession: line 129: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/gdm/Xession: line 130: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/gdm/Xession: line 148: /dev/null: Permission denied
/etc/gdm/Xession: line 83: /dev/null: Permission denied
-- the last error repeats about 20 times --
/etc/gdm/Xession: Executing default failed, wil try to run x-terminal-emulator
xlib: extension "Generic Event Extension" missing on display ":0.0".
-- repeats 5 more times --
Failed to get the session bus: Failed to execute dbus-launch to autolaunch D-Bus session
Falling back to non-factory mode.
Failed to contact the GConfg daemon; exiting.

I found a topic on google that suggested chowning your home directory but that did not help..

I tried removing /dev/null then recreating it (with sudo) with correct permissions, but after system reboot its back to what it was at crw-------

 

[Nothinman]

Are you sure it worked before hand?

If you fix the permissions on /dev/null with chmod and do 'sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart' does X come up?

 

[omber]

Well X starts but when you attempt to log in you get that error. I restarted X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. Now my root user is missing aperently - typing in root as username at login produces Login incorrect message.. what the heck is going on here.

 

[Nothinman]

By default on Ubuntu root doesn't have a password nor will GDM let him login even if he does. You're supposed to login as you and use sudo.

 

[omber]

I think I will have to reimage the machine again and start over again. On the interesting side, the XP insllation on the other partition appears to work fine

If I try to sudo it comes back "must be setuid root".

 

[Nothinman]

Something else happend then because that means the rights on /usr/bin/sudo got messed up as well. If you use Acronis for the Linux side I'd blame that.

 

[omber]

Sigh.. the reason for mirroring the Linux partition was that SDK for camera my company uses was on it and no one remembered where are the original discs (damned they are so disorganized its scary I have static IPs all over the network :/).. Turns one of the original developers copied the whole SDK to the Windows partition as well so I'm just going to reinstall Ubuntu 9.0.4 and then let the new dev do his magic on it . Thanks for the help Nothinman!