The easiest way to migrate to another (bigger) hard drive?

[Rick Stevens]

jludwig wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 16:11, Dhananjay Makwana wrote:
> 
>>Have a look at frisbee
>>http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/papers/frisbee-usenix03-base.html
>>
>>They have as part of it imagezip, imageunzip programs that you can use
>>to zip, unzip the whole hard disks. 
>>We have successfully used it to prepare clone machines with larger
>>disks.
>>
>>All the best,
>>-Jay
>>
>>On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 16:00, WipeOut wrote:
>>
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>Been trying to work out the easiest way to move from one hard drive to 
>>>another and be able to change the size of the partitions..
>>>
>>>I looked at dd but the disk geometry has to be the same so thats a problem..
>>>
>>>I tried ghost but it had issues..
>>>
>>>Basically I have two 40GB drives with two RAID 1 partitions (md0 and md1)..
>>>
>>>md0 is / and md1 is an LVM PV with a number of LV's (/home /var /data 
>>>and SWAP) on it..
>>>
>>>The only way I can think of to do it is to boot from one of the live CD 
>>>type distros and have one of the old drives and one of the new drives 
>>>connected and then partition the new drive, mount it and then copy the 
>>>data from one to the other.. Then change over to the other old drive 
>>>(the mirror) and the second new drive and do the same again..
>>>
>>>This seems very time consuming, laborious and prone to error..
>>>
>>>Is there any other way to clone Linux drives that will also allow me to 
>>>use drives with different geometry and hopfully be able to resize the 
>>>LVM partition to make use of the space??
>>>
>>>Later..
>>>
> 
> If I understand what you want to do, then you could tar the files and
> directories from root up and move them over as one big file. 
> Remember there are directories that could be reloaded S.A. /bin, /sbin
> and then upgraded.

Or (on the existing system):

	# cd /
	# tar cvpP -x /dev -x /proc -f /dev/st0 *

And on the new system, install the the system and

	# tar xvpPkf /dev/st0

It's clunky, but it works--assuming the new system is already bootable.

> In any case I have found moving to 'new media' is always time intensive.

Yup.  Sure is.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-         "The Schizophrenic: An Unauthorized Autobiography"         -
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