On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 10:23:45AM -0400, Kevin McKinley wrote:
> On Wed, 14 May 2003 06:54:34 +0530
> JK Malakar <cave_man@hotpop.com> wrote:
>
> > i have bought a 40GB HDD. is it possible to copy the existing Debian linux
> > from my old HDD to the new one as well as make it boot-able ?
>
> Sure. I did something like this when I bought a second hard drive; I was
> able to duplicate a dual-boot WinME/Debian system.
>
> I fumbled around a little, but these are the steps as I remember them:
>
> 1. Partition the new hard drive and format the linux partition. For this
> message assume you use one / partition for everything.
> 2. Boot with a CD/floppy Linux such as Knoppix or LNX-BBC.
> 3. Mount your old and new partitions.
> 4. Copy the files over:
> cp -a /mnt/old/* /mnt/new
> 5. Copy your MBR, but not the partition table:
> dd if=/dev/hda bs=448 count=1 of=/dev/hdb
> assuming /dev/hda is the old drive and /dev/hdb is the new one
> 6. Copy the parition boot record of the old linux / partition to the new:
> dd if=/dev/hda? bs=448 count=1 of=/dev/hdb?
My variant involves more typing but avoids the CD/floppy boot and only
implies one step of fiddling with hardware:
0) Backup old drive!
1) Partition & format new drive
2) Mount new drive's Linux partition on /mnt
3) make directories on new drive, including all mount points and stuff:
for x in `ls -1 /`; do if [ -d /$x ]; then mkdir /mnt/$x; chmod --reference=/$x /mnt/$x; fi; done
4) copy over the contents of directories, but omit /mnt, /proc and
anything else not helpful - check the list against your own / and
edit as appropriate. Yucky, but works:
for x in bin boot dev etc home initrd lib opt root sbin usr var; do rmdir /mnt/$x; cp -a /$x /mnt; done
5) edit /mnt/etc/fstab to mount the new drive as /
6) umount /mnt
7) reconfigure your bootloader to boot off the new drive
8) reboot
9) if it doesn't work - you can always reconfigure your bootloader
back to the old drive to get a working system back
if it does - you can wipe your old drive and get an extra 20Gb free
space.
--
Pigeon
Be kind to pigeons
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