[TriLUG] HDD Migration

[Shane O'Donnell]

Maybe it was because I missed the resize2fs step in the instructions, but I
can't tell you how many times I've screwed myself using dd to copy drives
over.

Most new HDs come with a manufacturer's utility to do this and so far, it's
worked for me every time.

Keep in mind that:

 - "every time" is about 3-4 times 
 - "every time" includes IDE-only
 - "every time" usually involves only "home user" filesystems (e.g., fat,
ext2, etc.)

Shane "short on experience, long on advice" O.

-----Original Message-----
From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On Behalf
Of erik at underhanded.org
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 3:23 PM
To: Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list
Subject: Re: [TriLUG] HDD Migration

On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 02:19:00PM -0500, Jason Browne wrote:
> I am trying to get some tips on migrating an install of Linux to another,
> bigger HDD?  It is a straight 1 HDD to 1 HDD change...  I know I could use
dd
> , but I am trying to see if there is a better way.

dd has worked fine for me many times, as long as you do resize2fs after
the dump.

If you recreate your top level directories (/tmp /bin /sbin etc), you
can use 'cp -a' for most of them with good results.  Don't do it for
lost+found, proc, dev, and sys(I think sys was special at least) though.

For dev, just copy over MAKEDEV and any other non device files, along
with all folders.  Then run MAKEDEV in the new /dev  This is all off the 
top of my head, and probably quite a bit mroe work then a pure copy, but 
it went fairly quickly in the few times I did it, and is a good way to 
make sure everything copied over sanely.

Or, there's ways of just using tar or cpio to do similiar in one step.

But as I said, dd is easy, and hasn't screwed up in my experience.  Just
make sure you shut down as many things as possible to keep your
filesystem from being too much of a moving target. (log files
especially)