solving devfsd problems when migrating a whole gentoo system

[h2o]

migrating a whole gentoo system from one harddisk to another can be done e.g. with remote-tar or rsync (or dd for exact bit-by-bit copies of whole disks -> if you use dd, ignore this posting).

actually, this should just work fine. but in practice, one needs some manual adjustments after having transferred all data from / (including /boot but except /proc).

required adjustements on the target box (at least in my case):

1.) grub needs to be reinstalled (though you made exact copies of your mbr and partition table). you can do this after having chroot'ed to your new system (see the gentoo installation manual).

2.) amazingly, you even need to recompile the kernel on your newly migrated system, else, devfsd probably won't work (/dev will be mounted but devfsd doesn't run [not shown in `ps aux|grep devfsd`]. error message when executing `devfsd /dev`: 'Error opening file: ".devfsd" No such file or directory'). after recompiling the kernel (same config as before) and rebooting, devfsd works again (i tried many other things, none of them solved it). sounds weird, but that's the way it is.

rgds

dan