Re: Cloning hdds of different sizes
Hi there.
I've commented in-line below.
On 28/05/14 21:02, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Wed, 28 May 2014 02:03:48 +0300
> Catalin Soare <lolinux.soare@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> In one of my computers I have 2 HDDs. One of them is a 250 GB drive
>> (debian) and the other is a 300 GB (data).
>>
>> I've decided to give one of them to my parents because the one they
>> have right now makes some strange noises. So I've backed up and
>> cleaned up the drive, and as we speak I am cloning my debian install
>> (from the 250 GB disk) onto the other drive.
>
> Sounds to me like a job for dd, or more specifically, ddrescue.
> ddrescue is featured on the System Rescue CD
> (http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage). With ddrescue's
> logs and many ways of writing, you can be assured of the maximum
> possible likelihood of getting the job done, and finding out if either
> drive has problems that should concern you.
>
> If you want a quick way of cloning the drive that isn't particularly
> error prone, this is it, especially if your 250 is fairly full so that
> file by file copy wouldn't save you much. If both drives are in good
> shape so there are no misreads or miswrites, I'd imagine the clone will
> take about an hour, unattended.
>
> If there are disk problems it will take longer, but file by file might
> have missed that fact and written bad data.
>
>> My fstab contains blkids to identify the root, swap, and home
>> partitions. Will the new clone just boot as if it was on the old
>> drive?
>
> After cloning the 250 onto the 300, the 300 will boot just like the
> 250, always assuming your last step before doing the clone is to get
> rid of the 300's entry in fstab. Labels and blkids on the 300 will be
> identical to the 250's after cloning.
>
>>
>> Also is there a simple method to resize the future home partition and
>> move the root partition so that I don't end up with unallocated space
>> on the drive?
>
> Now you're getting a little complicated. What I always do in this
> situation is just make an additional partition to consume that last bit
> of drive space, and usually find a use as a scratchpad area for that
> partition.
>
> Or, if you really want to make /home bigger, you can take the biggest
> subdirectory in /home significantly smaller than the new partition,
> rsync its contents to the new partition after mounting it, back them up
> somewhere else, remove them leaving only the empty directory on the
> original, and mount the new partition as that directory.
>
> If you want to expand a partition to include the unallocated space, I
> think you have to use whatever partition butts up against the
> unallocated space to make bigger. If there's a tool to enlarge a
> different partition and move the others to compensate, I"m not aware of
> it.
gparted can do this.
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/
> Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance
>
>
Regards,
Philip Ashmore
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