Re: [SLE] Upgrade Hard Drive - hda

Carl Hartung wrote:
On Tuesday 30 May 2006 19:28, Jim Flanagan wrote:
I currently have a 9.3 box with 3 drives installed, hda (windows98), hdb
(suse 9.1) and sda (suse 9.3) which is my default and almost always used
boot. I want to ditch the hda drive, and either add a new drive in its
place, or just use the current hdb drive. Three questions.
1. What is the best / easiest way to move or copy my current grub from
the current hda to the new drive?
2. If I use my existing hdb, do I need to configure it to hda, or will
it work as is?
3. Can I add another SATA drive (the sda is a SATA) and do away with the
2 IDE drives altogether?

Hi Jim,

I think you'd have better luck if you narrowed your question(s) down a bit. As it stands, some of the scenarios you've postulated contradict each other, meaning each requires a separate "write up" (too much work!)

General responses:

* Plan your changes so you understand, in advance, where each device is going to 'land'.

* Write down what each device will be mapped to after the change.

* Just before you shut down for the physical rearrange/upgrade, modify your bootloader (presumably grub) configuration and reinstall it in what will be the correct location for the new arrangement so the system will 'just boot' when you turn it back on. YaST's bootloader configuration module makes this part relatively easy. Also do the following:

* When you move a Linux drive from one position to another, the only thing that /should/ change is the device label, i.e. if hdb1 is 'swap' and hdb2 is '/', and you move/add things so the drive becomes 'hdd'... 'swap' becomes 'hdd1' and '/' becomes 'hdd2', and so on. Therefore, in each root partition on the drives that will be affected, you would need to also change the appropriate entries in /etc/fstab from 'hdbX' to 'hddX'. These changes plus updating the bootloader should make it possible to boot into the new configuration without difficulty.

* Check your system's BIOS to see what boot options are supported. If, for example, you wanted to eliminate your IDE hard drives, you'd need to confirm that you can enable one or the other SATA drives as the first boot device.

* Take your time during the planning phase to "cross your T's and dot your I's"... double and triple check your device mappings and bootloader changes in advance... doing so will save you substantial headaches and 'repair' work.

hth & regards,

Carl

Hi Carl,

Sorry to be confusing. The main thing I want to do is get rid of the current hda, containing grub and win98. I can either replace that drive with another drive, or use the existing hdb instead. My current install of 9.3 on sda will not change (until I upgrade to 10.0 or 10.1 at a later date). When you are talking about chaning device labels, where and how do I do this? In yast, or edit a file somewhere? I do realize that I need to make /etc/fstab point to these changes, but not sure where to start. Also, how do I get the boot configuration to the new drive?

Many thanks,

Jim F

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