[Liverpool] Migrating hard disks

[Dan Lynch]

Andy's solution is probably the best but if you want something more simple
you could always use Clonezilla, just download the live cd and boot from
that. It will let you clone single partitions or entire disks and you can
tell it the 3rd partition will be larger on the new disk, it'll deal with
that automatically. It's very clever. It essentially will be using tools
like dd and rsync under the surface but it gives you a much simpler
interface. You should be able to put both disks in the machine, clone the
old drive to the new one and then just swap them and boot up I think. I'm
not sure how it will deal with GRUB but I presume if you clone the disk that
will be copied too. You might still have to reinstall it though.

http://clonezilla.org/

I'm no sysadmin guru and I bow to Andy's superior knowledge on this but I
think this solution should work as well. It's really up to you. Worth trying
Clonezilla on your other machines anyway, it really kicks Ghost into touch
for me and it's all GPL. I know a few people who use it on their enterprise
set ups at work. I use it to make bootable images of my machines as backups,
I've restored a few and it's really seamless, works for Linux, Mac or
Windows.

Just had to throw my 2 pence in there sorry hehe :)

Dan


On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 11:48 AM, Andrew Williams <andy at tensixtyone.com>wrote:

> 2009/1/19 Adrian McEwen <adrian at mcqn.net>:
> > Morning all,
> >
> > A quick (I hope) techie question...
> >
> > My CentOS-based server has been running low on disk space, so I've bought
> a
> > shiny new 0.5TB drive for it.  Rather than graft the new drive onto the
> > existing filesystem (because I want to keep the install nice and simple
> and
> > the e-smith distro is happiest with a single drive) I want to move
> > everything from the existing drive onto the new one.
> >
> > What's the easiest and quickest way to copy everything from the old drive
> to
> > the new one?
> >
> > I'm thinking of booting from a Knoppix CD with both drives connected up
> and
> > then using "dd" to copy the contents of the old drive onto the new.  Is
> that
> > sensible?  Anything I need to worry about other than the partition table?
> >
> > The partition layout is  [boot partition | swap partition | everything
> else
> > partition] and it's the "everything else" partition that will be larger,
> so
> > I'm assuming that will all work okay?
>
> Best thing to do is to replicate the parition setup on the new drive,
> so same size boot, same size swap and the larger other drive.
>
> Then, boot Knoppix and mount the existing and new partions side by
> side, so for example /mnt/boot-old and /mnt/boot-new. Then use rsync
> between the drives, this will ensure that you get a 1:1 copy.
>
> After doing the two partitions, remember to disable the old drive,
> boot Knoppix and re-install grub on the new drive, once that is done
> you should be able to reboot and start up. Remember, keep the old
> drive available for a few days to make sure that backup is 1:1 :)
>
> --
> Andrew Williams / Nik_Doof
> w: http://tensixtyone.com/
> e: andy at tensixtyone.com
>
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>
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