[ale] backup a running RH7.2 box

[Sid Lane]

all,

for reasons I do not which to discuss I have a semi-pressing need to make as 
close a backup as possible of a running RH7.2 box. I can shutdown as many 
services as needed but am somewhat afraid of rebooting (especially spinning 
down the drives since we have had fairly high failure rate with that model).

I have tried the following without success:

1. install an identical drive in another server
2. fdisk to identical partitions as server to be cloned (S2BC)
3. format filesystems with same type as S2BC
4. shutdown as many services as possible on S2BC
5. tar / on S2BC (tar cvzpf cloneme.tgz /)
6. scp tarball to surrogate server
7. untar tarball
8. dd MBR from S2BC to surrogate drive
9. install clone drive to identical chasis as S2BC
10. kick the tire, light the fire...

it gets as far as "LI" (presumably of "LILO") and hangs...

can anyone tell me what the flaw(s) in my procedure is (/are) and how I 
might go about successfully accomplishing this? again, I would prefer not to 
reboot but would consider it as long as it did not require a power cycle 
(spinning down/up drives).

any help would be greatly appreciated...

thanks!
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