Q I recently moved my system from an old 120GB disk to a new 200GB disk. To do this, I booted from a Live CD, mounted both disks and used cpio to copy all the files across.
cd /mnt/old_disk find . -print | /mnt/old_disk/bin/cpio - pamd /mnt/new_disk
All went fine up until the point fluxbox wanted to start. To cut a long story short, it didn't. I can run TWM, xterms and aterms, but that seems to be about it on the graphical application front. All my favourite C apps seem OK. When I try to launch Gaim or Opera or pretty much anything else that uses X apart from MPlayer, they all segfault. Sometimes xine will appear briefly before dying, but Gaim never does anything. I've checked permissions to make sure they were preserved OK (as far as I can tell, they were). I've also recompiled my kernel and rebuilt X, all to no avail. Everything else, including Apache, PostgreSQL, MySQL and SSH, seems to be doing just fine; it's just the X apps. Any advice?
A If you still have the original 120GB drive, you may want to copy the data over again to ensure that all of the shared libraries that X applications need are complete. We normally just use cp -fra /mnt/old /mnt/ new to copy the contents of a whole hard disk, which generally does a good job of making sure everything is as it was. A tool such as strace can be used to look at exactly why a process fails: perhaps it can't open a /dev file, or there's a permissions issue that it doesn't know how to handle. The strace command is a little cryptic, but it is usually reasonably easy to figure out where exactly the application is bombing out.