Re: Moving Unstable to new HDD
On Thu, Nov 02, 2006 at 01:51:10PM -0500, KS wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I have a 80GB+40GB pair of HDDs in my desktop. The 40GB is the one which
> came with the system and contains the original Windows installation. The
> 80GB hard disk contains the Debian unstable system with different
> partitions for /, /boot, /usr, /home, /tmp, /var and a couple of others
> for data storage.
>
> I have ordered a 320GB SATA disk (along with a Promise controller card)
> and intend to move the Debian system to it (while keeping the 40GB as it
> is). Just redoing the installation on the new HDD is a possibility but I
> was wondering what other options are there to archive the goal. If I use
> dd, can I have the new partition size larger than the original one or
> does it have to stay same? What would be best way to move the system to
> the larger HDD and also have bigger /usr and /home partitions?
Several options (that's why you're using Debian, right?)
Do you need to keep your existing debian installation intact while you
redo things or do you have solid backups and can tolerate a couple of
hours of down-time? I don't think you can or should just use dd to move
your installed system around, but I'm skittish about things like that.
If you're confident in your backups (and you should be if you run
unstable), I would suggest that you partition the 80 GB drive thus:
1 64 MB
2 remainder
The 320 drive thus:
1 64 MB
2 same size or a bit more as partition 2 on the 80 GB drive
3 remainder
Then do a fresh Etch install. Set up the two partition 1s in a raid1 and
have /boot on that. Set up the two partiton 2s in a raid1 on that and
use that as a PV for lvm. Then setup lvm partitions of appropriate size
as suggested in the appendix of the installation manual. This can all
be done from within the installer.
Partition 3 you can leave untill you need more room. Then decide if the
reason you need more room needs the security of raid1 or the read speed
of raid0, in which case you would add a drive to match. Otherwise, use
it as a PV for lvm and then extend the LVs that need the room.
My set up is two identical 80 GB Seagate SATA drives setup just like
this with 2 partitions each. I don't have another drive for windows,
and since they're both the same size I don't have a spare partition.
If all this sounds like greek (or cantonese, depending on what your
native language is), as it was to me two months ago, read the LVM-HOWTO,
the RAID-HOWTO, and check my thread "LVM root?" on the amd64 list, where
I learned all about this.
The advantage of the raid1 is that a disk crash won't mean that you need
to reinstall and recovery is just shutting down gracefully, swapping in
a new drive, and coming back up and telling the raid about the new
drive/partition.
Good luck.
Doug.
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