[CLUE-Tech] Moving an existing installation to a second hard drive

[Adam Bultman]

Hmm.....  I am currently logged onto a machine where I transferred my
dual-boot solution from an 8 GB drive to a 60 GB one.  / is ext3,
/mnt/more (the large partition) is ext2, and the windows partition is
NTFS.  The only issue was I had to run fsck on the large partition
recently, but I think that was my fault.

Ghost has only failed me once; and that was attempting to transfer a
fubared windows partition (ntfs) from a SCSI drive, and I'm pretty sure
the SCSI drive as at fault (ghost didn't like it).

I'd give ghost a try.  I keep two disks handy:  win98 boot, and ghost, in
case I need to do stuff.  It's fast, reliable, and it has saved me a ton
of time.

Adam

--
Adam Bultman
adam at glaven.org
[ http://www.glaven.org ]

On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Jim Ockers wrote:

> Gary,
>
> > I'm a Linux newbee.  I have the same question regarding migration of my
> > Redhat 7.2.  I need to move from a 13 Gig to a 20 Gig with corresponding
> > expansions of partitions.
>
> > Is there a tool similar to PowerQuest's Drive Image or Symantec's Ghost
> > for MS Windows (ugh!)?
>
> Ghost works OK with Linux systems on older ext2-fs filesystems.  If you
> are using Red Hat 7.2 with the ext2 or ext3 filesystems you should not
> use ghost since it tries to be filesystem-aware but fails on these
> Linux filesystems and screws things up (doesn't work, etc.).
>
> What I would do is as follows:
>
> 1. Put both drives in your machine.  Make a careful note of which one
> is which so you don't format the wrong one.
> 2a. Boot from your original 13GB disk and get the system up & running.
> 2. Partition the 20GB drive however you want. (fdisk)  It would be a
> good idea to make the same general partition scheme as the old disk,
> so that you don't have to make a bunch of changes to the /etc/fstab
> and the boot loader configuration etc.
> 3. Make filesystems as necessary on those partitions (mkswap, mke2fs -j,
> and so forth).
> 4. Mount the filesystems of the 20GB disk somewhere in the VFS filesystem
> of the 13GB Linux system.  Say, in /mnt and so forth.
> ("mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /mnt " or some similar command.)
> 5. Copy everything except the /mnt directory to the new drive using
> tar.  Here is the command I like to use, it's a doozy:
>
> ( cd / ; tar -cf - all the directories to copy should be listed here ) | \
> 	( cd /mnt ; tar -xvlpsf - )
>
> This will make a complete copy of everything that was on the old file-
> system (including symlinks, hardlinks, file ownership, file permissions,
> and so forth).  Allow yourself some time for the copy.
> 6. Make a boot diskette since the new 20GB disk may not be bootable.
> (mkbootdisk)
> Or, you could experiment with the "lilo -r" command but be careful
> since the disk is probably not at the location on the IDE bus that
> it will be when you remove the 13GB drive.
> 7. Shut down, disconnect the 13GB drive, move the 20GB drive to that
> "spot" on the IDE bus
> 8. Reboot using your boot diskette.
> 9. Re-install the boot loader (grub-install I think) on the new drive.
>
>
> > Can those tools be used???
>
> Sometimes.  I wouldn't trust them though.
>
> Hope this helps.  There's probably an easier way.  The way I describe
> above is easy for me but then again I'm not a newbie.  Also, the way I
> describe is guaranteed to work every time on any size of disk and with
> any supported filesystem and boot loader provided you do it right.  :)
>
> --
> Jim Ockers (ockers at ockers.net)
> Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/
>
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