[Sussex] Cloning disks

[James Smith]

Afternoon all,

I managed to clone a disk with multiple partitions onto a new larger
disk the other day, and it was a lot easier than I expected:

1) Boot up an Ubuntu live CD
2) Run gparted
3) Copy/paste partitions between disks and resize as required.
4) Have cup of tea (optional)

Seeing as I wanted to boot with the new disk, I had to reinstall grub,
but that was as simple as booting up the Fedora CD in rescue mode and
re-running grub-install /dev/hda on the new disk.

Only thing - gparted can't handle LVM yet, so I had to fiddle with
than for a while, but it was as easy as adding the new LVM PV to the
volume group, then removing the old one, then having *another* cup of
tea while it moved it all over.

For a process that I thought was going to be a world of pain, it was
very easy indeed. No command-line fiddling at all - just the way I
like it :)

cheers,
James