RE: How to migrate a Debian system to another hard drive?

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

When replicating a system between two partitions, the thing most often
missed is that you must preserve symbolic links instead of copying them
as files. It's also important to preserve the ownership and permissions
of files, and obscure things like the setuid bits, character and block
special files, and named pipes.

I generally use this:

	cd /old_partition
	tar cf - . | (cd /new_partition; tar xvlpf -)

Note the "p" flag to the extracting tar. You must be "su"-ed to root
while doing this. See how each side of the pipe has a different
current directory?

	Thanks

	Bruce