I have cloned one of my servers (that is about to be shut down) into a VirtualBox machine. I used rsync for that, remembering to keep the relevant attributes etc. I also modified fstab. I have cloned a server like that before with success.The virtual server can boot but only read-only. This is some of the output:Loading, please wait...INIT: version 2.86 bootingmount: only root can do thattouch: cannot touch '/lib/init/rw/.ramfs': Read-only file systemmkdir: cannot create directory '/lib/init/rw/sendsigs.omit.d/ : File existsmount: only root can do thatStarting the hotplug events dispatcher: udevdSynthesizing the initial hotplug events...doneWaiting for /dev to be fully populated... [  6.435055] piix4_smbus 0000:00:08.0: SMB base address uninitialized - upgrade BIOS or use force_addr=0xaddr[   6.609103] Error: Driver 'pcspkr' is already registed, aborting.....It goes on like this a while with tons of errors related to the read-only filesystem, but eventually I get to the login prompt.I can login, but the system is severely crippled. For example, even though I login as root, for most commands I get Only root can do that.I have tried an fsck but that didn't help.Any ideas to make it boot normally would be much appreciated.It's an quite old Debian Lenny, by the way.EDIT: This is the rsync command:rsync -azhv  --exclude-from=exclude.lst / example@example.com:/backup/exclude.lst contains the following:# Exclude- /dev/*- /proc/*- /sys/*- /tmp/*- lost+found/- /media/*- /mnt/*
Cloned server will only boot read-only
linux;boot;virtualbox
Is /sbin/init owned by root, or by some other user instead ?Likely its owned by a non-root user, along with files like /bin/mount.  Which means when they run (they have the SUID bit set) they run as non-root.Example below.  See how mount and mount.steve have the same contents but mount.steve is owned by steve.  So mount.steve fails with the only root can do that because it's SUIDing to steve rather than root.[root@localhost bin]# ls -l mount mount.steve-rwsr-xr-x. 1 root  root  44208 Nov 27  2014 mount-rwsr-xr-x. 1 steve users 44208 Jun 30 14:11 mount.steve[root@localhost bin]# ./mount /foo /foomount: mount point /foo does not exist[root@localhost bin]# ./mount.steve /foo /foomount.steve: only root can do that (effective UID is 1000)[root@localhost bin]#(I'm new around here, didn't understand the whole comments vs answers thing, thanks for the coaching folks)