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

[brent timothy saner <brent.saner@gmail.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?
> 
> 


why don't you just copy over all the files (cp -r /mnt/old/*
/mnt/new/.), chroot into /mnt/new, and reinstall grub to the mbr?

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