Say you have an OpenBSD installation (with /dev and all) mounted on /mnt , and you'd like to clone it to /mnt2 , which is a partition of different size, so dd is not an option.
For simplicity of the example both the source and destination OS installations are on single ffs partitions, e.g. /mnt hosts /dev/sd1a which is sd1's only partition, and /mnt2 hosts /dev/sd2a which is sd2's only partition. Can you make cp or some other recursive copying tool properly replicate device files, links, file privileges and attributes, user and group ownership, and maybe even creation and modification times, so the copying together will make /mnt2 a complete and bootable replica of /mnt ? (Of course /mnt2 also needs proper treatment with fdisk, disklabel, newfs, installboot.) At the end of the day is copying a good idea at all or are there notorious failure points in the process such that OS reinstall or disk image cloning are prefered? Thanks, Tinker
