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 Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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