Moving Wheezy to New Drive, et al
Well, the hard drive in my personal desktop machine has been running virtually continuously for 7 years, and I'm gettin' nervous. So, time to transfer Wheezy to a new, bigger drive; something I've never done before. I've always clean installed. So, here's what I plan with a few questions. Opinions and suggestions appreciated before I take the leap.
I'll be using a gparted LiveCD and rsync for the transfers. Everything done as root, of course. There are other OSes on the old drive, but I won't be transferring them. The old drive will be removed after Wheezy is transferred, static bagged and stored in a drawer just in case.
1. Partition and format new 500GB SATA III drive. No LVM, RAID or GPT. [Note i]
2. Is 'rsync -axH <mount point source partition> <mount point destination partition>' sufficient to copy ALL files with permissions, etc?
3. Move the old grub.cfg out of the new /boot/grub/.
4. Ditto for old device.map.[Note ii]
5. Shutdown, remove old drive, reboot with LiveCD.
6. Chroot to new drive / partition: chroot <mount point / partition>
7. Create new grub.cfg: 'grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg'
8. Install grub on new drive's MBR: 'grub-install <new drive's system name, probably /dev/sda>'
9. Shutdown, reboot without LiveCD. See if it took.
10. Troubleshoot, if it didn't.
So, any glaring errors? Any better (read easier) ways to do this?
Thanks.
Patrick
i. The new drive will be partitioned, thusly: / on 1st Primary; /home on Second Primary; swap on Third Primary; Primary 4 Extended for future use.
ii. Read that grub-mkconfig will create a new device map on the fly, if none exists. True? Also, sometimes leaving the old one in place causes problems. True? If I need to create a new one is there a utility that does that, or do I just decipher it and make the necessary changes manually?
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