Re: [PLUG] Need Advice on Cloning A Disk Drive

[Gordon Dexter <gordon@texasdex.com>]

Casey Bralla wrote:
> I'm trying to migrate my existing Gentoo system to a larger hard drive.  (I've 
> maxed out my 80 GByte drive, but have a 200 GByte lying around.)
>
> I'm having trouble cloning my drive to the new drive and would like some 
> advice from the list.
>
>
> Complicating my problem, is that I'm changing from ReiserFS on the old drive 
> to ext3 on the new drive.  
>
> (ReiserFS has been good to me, but now that it has been established that Hans 
> Reiser is not simply an uber-geek with no social skills, but a true 
> sociopathic murderer, I doubt if ReiserFS development will continue on any 
> meaningful way.)
>
>
> If both disks were the exact same size and used the same file system, I could 
> simply "dd" the old disk onto the new disk.  Also, since they are different 
> file systems, I can't use partition tools like Partition Magic and its 
> equivalents.
>
>
> Here's what I've been trying to do (and where it has failed).
>
> 1.  Install the new disk as a slave drive
> 2.  Boot to Knoppix.
> 3.  Mount both the old drive and the new drive under Knoppix
> 4.  Copy the entire old drive onto the new drive
> 5.  Reboot to the old drive and old system.
> 6.  Run grub on the new drive to set the MBR on the new drive.
> 7.  Swap the old and new drives so that the BIOS boots to the new drive
> 8.  Enjoy my new disk with extra breathing room!
>
> This technique has failed during the process of copying Character or Block 
> Devices.   Knoppix was not able to write the block devices to the new disk.   
> I'm not knowledgeable about these types of devices to create them separately.
>
> I was able to boot to the new disk, but the system failed when it could not 
> establish a "session" (I think it said).  I presume this is because my new 
> disk did not have any tty's created.
>
>
> My questions for the list:
>
> 1.  Is there a way to copy block and character devices?
> 2.  How else could I (easily) create them on the new drive?
> 3.  is there any other simple way to duplicate a linux disk
Creating new block devices would involve using the mknod command.  But 
I'm not sure if that's your problem.  Most modern systems should make 
most of them automattically with udev and related systems.

--Gordon
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