On 04/03/2016 11:20 AM, David Sommerseth wrote:
> On 03/04/16 17:10, John Pilkington wrote:
>> I've had an interesting week with a new 3TB drive and a family box that has
>> been running MS Vista for years.  I disconnected the Windows HD 'for safety'
>> and installed kubuntu from the live DVD, with few problems until I tried a
>> 'real' boot, which failed.  Eventually I installed buntu 14 with grub
>> alongside Vista on the original HD, and also have buntu 16 beta on the new
>> one; at present they will all boot and run.  Don't know if SL7 would do the
>> same.  But the USB drive exploit looks handy.
> This should work on the majority of all Linux distributions, at least if you
> use UUID for the /boot partitionsi.  Use of LVM can also simplify mounting the
> root parition (/) and so on - unless you use UUID for those mount points too.
>
> I've booted several old Linux installations from hardrives put into a USB
> closure. I haven't tried to do that with Windows though, that might work too -
> but somehow I imagine it will freak out at some point where drive letters
> won't match properly.
>
> To get an overview you can run 'blkid' or 'lsblk -o NAME,UUID' on your system
> to see all devices and their unique UUID.  These tools are also valuable when
> you need to modify /etc/crypttab manually.
>
>
> --
> kind regards,
>
> David Sommerseth
Thank you for that approach, but what you describe does not seem to be 
what I am suggesting.

Rather, I was going to use dd in single user mode (does the old init 
method still work with the EL 7 replacement for
init to get to single user mode, scrolling text screen, no GUI, or is 
another mechanism required?) to make an image of my booting, working SL 
7.1 installation on a 1 Tbyte external USB drive.

Then, using the boot control screen of the target laptop -- well before 
any OS boots -- I was going to set the boot device to be
USB, plug the "bootable" dd'ed USB 1 Tbyte external drive into a USB 
port on the target machine, and boot from that.  If my
present system is bootable, etc., will not the dd'ed USB drive be 
bootable (except perhaps for that efi "chunk" issue I mentioned 
elsewhere and do have any
elucidation on that point) or do I need to worry about UUID, etc., 
issues with the dd'ed "copy"?  Are new UUIDs generated/required to boot 
such an
"imaged" external USB drive?

Regards,

Yasha Karant