On 01/15/2010 07:33 PM, Jarry wrote:
Hi, I'm facing this problem:
I want to exchange hard-drive in my computer for other, bigger
one. I do not want to add new hard-drive somewhere on mount-point
permanently, I just want to copy everything from the old drive
to the new one and then get rid of the old one. And of course,
I'd like to use my computer as before. What is the best (maybe
I should ask for safest) way to acomplish this?
First I thought about "cp -a". But I'm not sure which directories
I should skip (/proc, maybe some other like /dev?). And I do not
know how cp handles links (if I first copy link and later target,
where is the link pointing? to the original file or its copy?).
Maybe dump/restore is better solution? Or something else?
I'll just copy the instructions I have someone else here:
You can clone the existing Gentoo installation into the new partition
and boot from it. You can do this while the system is actually running.
The new partition can be anything you want (different size, different
file system). This usually means:
rsync your existing / to your target / (except /dev, /sys and /proc and
of course mount points that belong to a different filesystem, /boot or
/home for example if you're using dedicated partitions for those). If
you mounted your target / as /root/newpart, this is done with:
rsync -ax / /root/newpart
If this copied directories it shouldn't have (like /sys or /proc),
simply delete them again.
Then:
mkdir /root/newpart/dev
mkdir /root/newpart/proc
mkdir /root/newpart/sys
mknod /root/newpart/dev/console c 5 1
mknod /root/newpart/null c 1 3
touch /root/newpart/dev/.keep
touch /root/newpart/proc/.keep
touch /root/newpart/sys/.keep
Now chroot into it to set up the boot loader (I assume you use Grub):
mount -t proc none /root/newpart/proc
mount -o bind /dev /root/newpart/dev
chroot /root/newpart /bin/bash
Now edit /etc/fstab to use the new partition and edit
/boot/grub/grub.conf and reinstall grub:
grub
root (hd0,0) <-- sustitute with what you really have/want
setup
quit
You're ready. Leave the chroot and unmount:
exit
umount /root/newpart/dev
umount /root/newpart/proc
If you've set up grub correctly while in the chroot, you can now reboot
and the system should come up using the new partition. If you used a
different filesystem for the new partition (for example going from ext3
to ext4), make sure your kernel supports the new filesystem.
