I was not doing that copy by myself, my colleague did, the result is each directory under root has own tar file - /dev was excluded. He said that he used option to preserve file attributes.
At first I've extracted it as it was - hoping that it will work, as on Linux it would, but when I used 'scoadmin' to reconfigure network it didn't let me relink/recompile kernel because it couldn't find some devices. Also partition table was changed, so it seems that it keeps partition table in some file... it was really strange for me.
Eventually, I found that SCO keeps system specific files in those K and P folders so I did like this:
- tar /etc/ /usr/SCO/K,P on virtual server
- untar backup files (all subfolders of /) from physical server on virtual
- overwrite /etc /usr/SCO/K,P with tar file done in first step
Surprisingly after such operation relink of kernel was fine, and boot was fine also, I'm not sure if it works as on production if all services are fine.
The reason I did it that way, I thought that everything that was on physical one will be transferred but overwriting crucial directories with virtual machine default ones (those after installation) will solve the issue with drivers, partition setup, but still services in rc.d (transferred from physical) will be there and will be able to start and will have their configuration files.
So, It would be good to know if such procedure is reliable or if there are some directories that should be included in first step, so that files from new virtual machine are kept same as they were after the installation.