Re: Upgrading hard drives

Darius <Darius@::1.v> writes:

Before I begin, I have noticed a similar question recently on this
group, but not quite the same questions I have, so it's not 100%
duplicate.

I wish to get a bigger hard drive to replace a long-in-tooth drive.
The way my pc is organised is Windows (on a bootable partition) and
also GRUB, is on one drive, and the entire Linux OS (non-bootable
partitions) is on a second drive, which also has one FAT32 partition.
It is easy to copy the FAT32 partition, the hard drive manufacturer
software can do that, but it doesn't understand "Linux" partitions.

My Linux newbie questions are:

1. Is there any easy "bootable" software to copy exactly the
files/permissions etc. from the old drive to the new one for Linux
partitions, also graphically create new Linux partitions on the new
drive and format them?

Yes. Just install the new hard drive, partition it ( eg using cfdisk),
format with mkfs, and
use say rsync to copy over the stuff.

Say your new drive is /dev/hdb, with partions /dev/hdb1 as / and /dev/hdb5
as /usr. and /dev/hda6 as /home

mkdir /hdb

mount /dev/hdb1 /hdb
rsync -x -av / /hdb
mount /dev/hdb5 /hdb/usr
rsync -x -av /usr /hdb/usr
mount /dev/hdb6 /hdb/home
rsync -x -av /home /hdb/home

(or whatever your new drives are.)


2. If there is no bootable software, how can you copy the Linux
partitions without booting the entire system (which means that files
would change)?

If you want you could do all that booting single user. The files which will
change will be mainly log files, and you don't really care if they do not
have exactly all the info.


3. Does it matter if the new drive has different partition types
compared to the old drive (ie. Rieser vs Ext3)?

No. But use ext3.


4. Does it matter that the new drive would have larger partitions then
the old one when copying the files?

NOt if you use something like rsync to copy over the files.

5. Would GRUB have to be edited in some way when replacing the old
drive with the new drive? In Windows you can copy say C and D, and
just do a straight swap old for new drive and the drive letters will
still be C and D.

On linux you tell the system how and where to mount stuff. You can now
leave your system on /dev/hdb and use hda for other stuff. Just edit
grub and tell it to boot from the appropriate boot on /dev/hdb.


Thanks
Darius
.

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