Re: Best way to "Clone" a Linux Hard drive?

From: Jayson Garrell (kyi_at_kyi.sytes.net)
Date: 02/18/04


Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 13:48:53 -0800

On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 22:14:14 +0000, h1nd00_p$ych1a7r1$7 wrote:

> I've found several methods:
>
> 1) LVM Snapshots
> 2) DDing of whole drive or partitions
> 3) Mirroring, Syncing, and breaking (Although I havn't figured out how)
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions as to which is better, or other options?

Last time I did this, moved to a bigger drive. I used cp. It worked fine.
Look at the help or man page for cp to get the right switchs but it works
great. Basically I did the following.

1) Turn off pc and put new drive on the bus. I put the new drive where it
was going to be when done, ie... moved the original drive to hdb and
placed the new drive as hda.

2) Boot pc from a rescue cd, I use the gentoo liveCD but you can use any
you wish.

3) make mount points for both drives. I use /mnt/old (for old drive) &
/mnt/new (for new drive). Mount both drives.

4) cp -vrpf /mnt/old/* /mnt/new/

5) cd to /mnt/new

6) chroot /mnt/new /bin/bash

7) lilo (re-run lilo to rebuild the boot loader)

8) turn pc off and remove old drive, turn pc back on.

You should now be good to go, running on the new drive. Like I said I have
used this method before and it's always worked. Last night I upgraded the
drive on my mini-itx mobo, but this time I used partimage
http://www.partimage.org and burnt the images to a bootable cdrom. Just to
make it easier for the next time.

Jayson G



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