Re: Replacing Dying Harddisk (ReiserFS)

[Christian <christiand59@web.de>]

Am Dienstag, 21. Dezember 2004 22:16 schrieb Ron Johnson:
> On Sun, 2004-12-19 at 15:33 +0100, Christian wrote:
> > Am Sonntag, 19. Dezember 2004 14:36 schrieb Darryl Clarke:
> > > Hi,
>
> [snip]
>
> > Make a filesystem on the new partition (i'd choose reiserfs or ext3)
> >  mkfs -t reiserfs /dev/sda1
> >
> > Mount the new filesystem
> >  mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/new_disk
> >
> > Copy the whole old disks contents to the new disk and preserve all file
> > attributes
> >  cp -a / /mnt/new_disk
>
> This has failed for me, with symlink issues.
>
> Say the original drive /dev/hda is partitioned into :
>   hda1 /
>   hda2 /usr
>
> Because of /etc/alternatives, there are symlinks between hda1 and
> hda2.  So, if you cp hda1 to sda1 and hda2 to sda2, the symlinks
> will still be pointing to the hda partitions.  Thus, when you
> umount, all the inter-partition symlinks will be broken.

I think I missed something. The -x option to "cp" namely. 
 cp -ax / /mnt/new_disk

I currently don't understand what you mean with symlink issues (this should 
_not_ sound rude, i'm not a native english speaker). The only disadvantage I 
can think of is that hardlinked files will be seperated. One can only avoid 
this by using a filesystem dump utility. 
Symlinks should not make any problems if the path to the linked to file does 
not change. (Even if the partitioning scheme changes there should be no 
problems as long as the mount point is the same)

One could also try to use "dd" as long as the sector adressing of the disk 
won't change...

-Christian