Re: [debian-user] How to copy a laptop HD?
Have a look at partimage. Specifically you might be interested in the
CloneZilla live distro. It's built specifically for the purpose of porting
installations between hard disks.
Lee
On Tuesday 20 May 2008 01:47:03 pm Javier Vasquez wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have an old laptop with a 10G HD. I have it partitioned into a swap
> partition hda5, an ext3 boot partition hda6, and an ext3 root
> partition hda7 (all logical). I acquired an 80G HD, and through an
> USB interface I have it partitioned the same way, only with bigger
> root partition, :).
>
> I did a copy of the contents of each partitions, except by /proc under
> root, into the new created ones, but I used "cp -a" instead of "dd".
> This might have prevented copying the boot sector, necessary for the
> boot sector probably...
>
> Do you suggest using "dd" instead? Would it work even if the destine
> partition is bigger (I read somewhere it works perfectly when source
> and destine are the same size, but I never read it works perfectly
> when destine is bigger)...
>
> What about the HD MBR? I've tried already using "dd if=/dev/hda
> of=~/full_mbr.bin bs=512 count=1 && dd if=~/full_mbr.bin of=/dev/sda
> bs=446 count=1", but it didn't seem to work... I wouldn't know if
> using count=2 to include the boot sector would work since the boot
> partition is the 2nd one (the swap is the 1st one)...
>
> Any ways, I'm still on trials, but I haven't gotten grub to work yet.
> I tried also "grub-install" on sda, but that doesn't seem to work, it
> only does with chroot to the mounted root of sda and with a bind to
> the mounted boot of sda, however partially since it doesn't get to
> read stage2. Running manually grub over the chroot seems to overcome
> the stage2 thing, but I still don't get grub to work after booting.
>
> The thing is that as this is a laptop, and changing the HD on the only
> IDE slot is getting less fun each time, I was thinking what would be a
> good recipy to follow. Maybe using dd for each partition, or for the
> whole HD would work, although I find it hard to believe it would (the
> partition tables at least should be different, since the difference in
> sizes), but I just might be too skeptical, and using dd for the whole
> HD is what works out of the box after partitioning the HD, :).
>
> Please suggest, recommend, etc, :).
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Javier
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