Re. http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-help/2002/12/19/0012.html

"Drag all the files over in Konquerer," you say?  You mean one-by-one drag
every file on your NetBSD system over to the new disk?

 (a) Sounds extremely tedious.  (You might be able to avoid such
     tedium by copying whole directories from the top level of your
     filesystem; Konqueror probably will let you do that.  But the
     other two problems still hold.)

 (b) Unless you run Konqueror as root (probably not the best of ideas),
     you won't be able to set ownership and permissions correctly, and
     may not even be able to read every file you need to copy.

 (c) As someone said, you would still need to copy the boot-blocks.

So, my response is, "I wouldn't advise it."  (^&


What I'd do depends on what you really want to do.  Are you just setting
up a second system?  Realize that as soon as you have it up and running,
you will probably almost immediately start to develop divergent files for
your home directory (if nothing else).  You either need to do some extra
setup work (to share the fiels that they will update, or you'll need to do
ongoing work to synchronise the disks.  Or you probably will end up with
divergent disks anyway.  The important thing is to get NetBSD installed
and configured on the new disk, and at least some of your personal
configuration data transfered.

Or maybe you have a configured system that is "the way you like it" and
are trying to rub off copies to give to other people?  Letting them
install a vanilla NetBSD system and giving them copies of your modified
configuration would be easiest on a small scale, I think; rolling your own
installation system might be best if you want to distribute to a lot of
people.

Or are you trying to migrate your use from one machine to another (and/or
treat one computer as a backup for the other)?  Perhaps the various backup
and restore options would be worth considering.


Note that I haven't said anything about how to accomplish the copy.  Of
course, if you're as stubborn as I tend to be, you're not interested in
hearing debating whether you should mirror the disk; you'll do it and
decide for yourself in the aftermath.  *grin*  On the off chance that
you're not set on mirroring thedisk, though, my suspicion is that an exact
mirror is not what you really want.  It depends on why you want the second
system for.


Good luck.


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu