[Gllug] Moving System to a new Disk - checking out my plan...

[Nix]

On 26 Jun 2007, Ken Smith uttered the following:

> Hi Guys, I have an FC6 system (MythTV) where hda=60G and hdb=250G. hdc 
> has a dvd drive on it.
>
> Smartd, and a couple of system lockups, tell me that hda is on its way 
> out. /boot is on hda. The rest of the system uses LVM and there were 
> some LV's in a VG that was spread over hda and hdb. Interestingly LVM 
> had put most of the data on the hdb area anyway.
>
> I've now shrunk one of the LV's (and, first, the ext3 filesystem in it!) 
> and shrunk the VG so it is now only on hdb. So hda now only holds /boot

I imagine there was some pvmoving in there as well, but anyway...

(I take it you also know about `lvs -o +devices' which is damn useful
in situations like this.)

> I have a 300G drive, to replace hda, currently connected via USB as sda. 
> I have created swap and /boot partitions & filesystems on it and 
> tar/untar'd the content of /boot over to it.
>
> So my plan is....
>
> - Shutdown, take the 60G hda out and install the 300G in its place, boot 
> with FC6 rescue system.

As long as you've vgreduced first, which it sounds like you have, that
should be fine. I always forget this step and end up with the VG refusing
to start because one of its PVs is missing, even though it's empty.

> - label the new boot partition as /boot and check in fdisk that its set 
> bootable.
> - reinstall grub.

That sounds strange to me, but I think that's just because all my
multi-disk systems have RAID-0'ed /boot with LILO installed on the
root filesystem of every disk.

(It would be sort of hard for you to do this now because you don't
have the room on the second disk...)

> - reboot into fc6 from hda. (I hope)
> - extend the VG into the new space in hda and stretch the LV's and file 
> systems as required.

Sounds like it'll work. The only risk is whether the new system will
find the root fs, which as it's the same kernel as it used to be it
certainly should.

> Smile - So what am I missing? This should work - shouldn't it.

Yep.

> In order to do some testing of new s/w releases, without risking the 
> 'production' system, I have also created a 15G partition on the new hda. 
> My plan is to tar/untar or rsync the current system (/boot and 
> everything else) into that partition. (Less the huge .mpg files, the 
> rest of it is only 4.5G. The test system doesn't need to be a big LVM 
> setup, just enough to test out new kernels and especially capture 
> drivers.)

I'd make it an LVM setup (with its own VG) anyway. The benefits are
just too large. (Eventually you *will* run out of space on there and
want to expand it...)

-- 
`... in the sense that dragons logically follow evolution so they would
 be able to wield metal.' --- Kenneth Eng's colourless green ideas sleep
 furiously
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