copy full system from old disk to a new one

[Heinz Diehl]

On 17.02.2013, Martín Marqués wrote: 

> How can I pass my whole system from an old SATA disk (which is giving
> me some trouble) to a new disk.
[....]
> I'm a bit concerned about the root file system, how to change grub,
> and if I'll have trouble with non-regular files from /var.

You can do that easily. Prepare your new disk (partition, format),
boot from an external medium, e.g. http://www.sysresccd.org , 
mount the old and the new partitions and do a

 rsync -avxHSAX /old/ /new

This is all you need. Afterwards, you'll have to reinstall GRUB, which
you can do this way (assumed /dev/sda1 is yor root partition):

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
grub2-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda
grub2-mkconfig -o /mnt/boot/grub2/grub.cfg

That's it. Reboot, and you're done.
(Did this procedure a lot, and it never failed for me).