[PLUG] Need Advice on Cloning A Disk Drive - Success!

[Casey Bralla <MailList@NerdWorld.org>]

I succeeded in my quest to upgrade my hard drive today.  I thought the list 
might be interested in how I finally did it.

Objective:  As you may remember, I wanted to "clone" a functioning 80 GByte 
disk onto a 200 GByte disk on my Gentoo system, while at the same time 
changing from the ReiserFS to ext3 file systems.  I had had trouble copying 
pseudo file entries (like /dev/dsp) on the hard disk, and had been 
unsuccessful booting to the new drive.  I got lots of good suggestions on how 
to do this, and this is the process I finally used:

1.  Install new disk as slave (/dev/hdb)
2.  Partition new disk and create ext3 file system on /dev/hdb1
3.  Boot to live CD (I used Knoppix)
4.  Mount old disk (/dev/hda1) and new disk (/dev/hdb1)
5.  Use rsync to copy **all** the files from /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdb1
6.  Remove original hard disk, and install new hard disk as master
7.  Boot again to live CD
8.  Mount new disk (now it is /dev/hda1)
9.  Chroot onto new disk
10.  Run grub to initialize the MBR on the new disk
11. Reboot to "Nerdvana"



Comments:

It has been suggested that I didn't need to copy all the device files from the 
old disk.  I don't know, but I wanted to be sure I had copied every "stub" of 
the device files left on the original disk.  For some reason, the normal copy 
commands would **not** copy these files.  However, rsync seemed to have no 
trouble at all (at least, it never complained if it did).

I think my most critical failure previously was to not chroot into the new 
disk before running grub.  I also had tried running grub when the new disk 
was still the slave.   I'm not sure if this had an effect or not, but....

-- 


Casey Bralla
Chief Nerd in Residence
The NerdWorld Organisation
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