On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 03:21:32PM +0200, Nikos Chantziaras wrote: > 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
If you are doing it this way (on a running system with mounted dev/proc/sys...), you can just bind-mount your current / to another directory. That "copy" will not contain any "sub-mounts" (as if you accessed it from a livecd), so you could just do (mount your /mnt/new_root) mkdir /mnt/current_root mount -o bind / /mnt/current_root rsync -aHAX /mnt/current_root/ /mnt/new_root/ i always remout / readonly first, for that you usually have to go to single user, or stop most of the services and programs... yoyo > > 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. > >
