[Wylug-help] Switching the system to a new hard drive

[Felix Ulrich-Oltean]

Hi

I've had Debian unstable running for years on a system with the main
IDE disk being quite ancient now, and it looks like it's about to die.

I do already have another SATA disk in there, which at the moment just
holds music and other data.  I would like to migrate all my "system"
files across so that the whole thing runs off the newer disk.


I haven't done anythng like this for years, so I was just hoping
someone would glance at my plan and point out any obvious omissions or
danger points:

My current 'mount' output:

/dev/hda3 on / type ext2 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
tmpfs on /lib/init/rw type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,mode=0755)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
udev on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext2 (rw)
/dev/hda5 on /home type ext2 (rw)
/dev/sda1 on /data type ext3 (rw)
nfsd on /proc/fs/nfsd type nfsd (rw)

My plan:

- make some new partitions with cfdisk on /dev/sda

- mount the new partitions and copy across all the data (with rsync or
  cp?)

- change /etc/fstab to point /var, /home, /boot and / to the new
  partitions

- fiddle with /boot/grub/menu.lst (not sure exactly what to put in
  there?)

- cross fingers, etc.

Any advice, pointers, HOWTO ideas, etc much appreciated,

Thanks,

Felix.