Transplanting old System to New Drive
I have a 10-gigabyte hard drive that sounds like a 747
just before takeoff so the time has come to replace it. I
replaced it with a 16-gigabyte SATA flash drive and IDE adaptor
as the system it runs on is a little too old to handle a large
drive.
If I use dd to copy the 10-gig drive over to the new
drive as in:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=20M
it works when I remove the old screamer drive, change the jumper
on the new drive to Master and boot but this is not very
efficient as it wastes almost 6 gigs of drive.
What I tried to do was to format /dev/hdb with hdb1
being around 15GB and then /dev/hdb2 being extended and holding
hdb5 marked as swap just like /dev/hda. /dev/hdb1 is also set to
bootable and shows up as such when using fdisk /dev/hdb and
then the p command.
The rsync command tries to copy everything on the old
disk except /proc and it also fails to copy those files which
probably never stay around such as timer values and other
volital information so /dev and everything else get copied.
When I boot the efficiently-built system, it does start
to boot and then hangs.
Is there a way to copy the working file system to a
larger drive such that the new drive will also boot?
In case you find this confusing, I mount the clean new
disk on /mnt2. The rsync command excludes "mnt2" to prevent
infinite recursion, but this pretty well describes what I am
trying to do.
I even tried to use the dd method and then tune2fs but I
either did something wrong or this can't work because I still
had only a 9.6G file system when all was said and done.
Thanks for any suggestions as to how to transplant the
old OS to the larger drive and still make it work.
I bet the MBR that is being put on the new drive can not
find grub or something along those lines because /boot and the
kernel are there. It really looks like it should work, but
doesn't.
Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group
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