After all the years with Haiku I’m feeling like a complete newbie right now:
I can’t find a working way to clone a drive?
The »Installer« is not copying the complete system anymore and dd is failing, too.
So, is there any simple way to copy a Haiku installation from one drive/partition to another?
(It’s an tricky vintage system, which does not allow booting from CD or USB …)
Can you boot from floppy? If so, use a floppy-based Linux and boot from it ensuring no drives are mounted so DD will work cleanly. I would suggest HAL91 at http://chris.silmor.de/hal91/.
You can try wih Clonezilla.
Just copy all files from the haiku system to a blank bfs partition.
We have no registrations like windows who can lost.
Thank you, good idea! I will test it.
… Thank you, i will test this option, too.
Interesting to hear. On my last attempt i was bombarded with error messages.
I hadn’t pursued it any further because I thought that symlinks and the like would not be taken into account – copying by hand. I’ll re-examine that too.
The installer does not make things on other way, only copy the files too.
Both should work. What are your problems with each?
Installer is copying without errors, but /system contains only a few directories afterwards.
dd was working for a while but showed an error after completing, too.
I’m sorry, but i cannot remember the error message exactly – will do it again and report …
That’s normal for Installer. The content of /system is mostly in packages, and only visible when booting the system and mounting the packages.
I understand. That irritated me and I thought that was also the reason why I cannot boot from this partition. Then i have to look for other causes.
Is the cloned system on a partition of the same HDD as the current one? The haiku bootmenu only can boot from the hdd on first boot position, set in bios. Or the partition is not set as bootable?
I need to change the first boot hdd in bios before i can start haiku.
You can only see a few directories, because the haiku system directories are virtual. The system hanging in the hpkg packages at startup.
Thank you. With exception of the virtual system directories I’ve learned anything else with my experiments before 
Now I had some success with an USB-to-IDE-adapter and the installer app. Good to know that this easy way is still working.
But I guess this particular PC is too old and buggy, the user experience is very unstable and random. (Just wanted to give my old neighbor an alternative to Windows, since she found this old system in her basement …)
Just use the installer to install to an USB-Drive, all your files and settings will be copied too…
On second thought, since the suggestions are not preserving a partition image. I usually use ‘rsync’ for this kind of operation. But Haiku does not have that command yet AFAIK (hopefully soon).
To preserve the symlinks, you could use zip & unzip or tar & gzip. Or maybe this combination: zip -r - . | dd of=/dev/sdb0 obs=64k (whatever the BFS blocksize your partition is).
of=partition/drive/file
obs= BYTES write BYTES bytes at a time (default: 512 )
pkgman install rsync