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Re: How to move debian from one drive to another and keep it working?

On Fri, 27 May 2005, David Witbrodt wrote:


I just installed Debian for the first time.  I have two hard drives, one on the motherboard IDE controller and a bigger, better one on a PCI controller card.

I wanted to install Debian to the drive attached to the PCI controller, but the installer didn't recognize the card, so I was forced to install Debian to the old drive.  Then, the installer installed a kernel that _did_ recognize the PCI controller, so now that Debian is installed to the wrong place I am able to partition and use the drive where I wanted Debian to be in the first place!

I need advice from experienced users on how to move a working Debian from here:

 /         /dev/hda7
 swap     /dev/hda5

to here:

 /dev/hdg5    /
 /dev/hdg2    /boot
 /dev/hdg6    /usr
 /dev/hdg7    /tmp
 /dev/hdg8    /var
 /dev/hdg9    /home
You will need to setup /etc/fstab and grub appropriately, these are the main disk dependent settings IIRC. 


As a newbie, I'm in danger of doing some real stupid things.  My first guess at a solution would involve the following steps:

1.  Copy (recursive) each corresponding directory to the appropriate partitions
Recursive copy isn't the best solution since you need to preserve symbolic links, ownership and special files. IIRC you should do cp -a as root, but check the man page for cp just to make sure.
You also don't want to copy /proc and if you are using 2.6 kernel, /sys. If you are not using devfs or udev I think the MAKEDEV script (or somthings similar which sits in /dev IIRC) is a better way then recursive copy of the devices.
> 2. Modify certain config files to point at the new partitions 
3.  Modify grub settings, especially 'menu.lst' and use grub-install to write the MBR on
the new drive.  (I am going to alter the BIOS settings so that the new drive boots first -- the controller card has its own BIOS and supports this feature -- but that means the original install of grub to the old drive's MBR will no longer operate.)

Help, either in the form of recommended steps or references to the appropriate documents, would be much appreciated!


Thanks,
Dave Witbrodt







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