[GLLUG] Suggestions on hardware migration?

Matt Graham danceswithcrows at usa.net
Tue Jul 12 13:39:05 EDT 2005


On Tuesday 12 July 2005 12:51, after a long battle with technology, 
Lachniet, Mark wrote:
> I need to upgrade my linux box to faster hardware, and I'm going from
> one box to a totally different one.  I don't want to reinstall
> because it takes too much time for the post install tweaks.
>
> So what I was thinking is to just do a dd copy (e.g. 'dd if=/dev/hda
> of=/dev/hdc bs=512') to just move the whole thing over intact

Nope.  For one thing, you never use bs=512 for moving large amounts of 
data.  For another thing, dd is the worst backup method in existence.  
You should hook both disks up to the same machine, cfdisk the new disk, 
mke2fs (or mkreiserfs) the partitions on the new disk, then cp -a each 
filesystem.  That'll take a lot less time than dd will.  Or you can go 
read the Hard-Disk-Upgrade HOWTO on http://tldp.org/ , which covers 
this topic in extreme detail.

You will have to reinstall the bootloader.  This is a 5-minute job with 
a LiveCD.  You didn't specify whether you were using GRUB or LILO, but 
GRUB is easy--like so:

rescue~# grub
grub> root(hdX,Y)   # where your /boot is
grub> setup(hd0)    # install GRUB to MBR of first hard disk
grub> quit          # done!

> use a partition resized (Partition magic?) to expand the linux
> partitions to fill the rest of the drive.

Bad idea.  PQMagic doesn't have a great track record with Linux 
filesystems, and resize2fs requires that the first block of the ext[23] 
filesystem stay in the same place.  Make a new partition table and use 
mkfs and cp -a; it'll have less chance of failure.  The *only* thing 
that requires absolute sector positions on a Linux system is the 
bootloader, and reinstalling one is easy.  HTH,

-- 
   Some people are alive only because it is traditional to keep
   torturing the poor guy about being lost in the machine room with an 
   IBM water buffalo.  --MegaHAL, trained on ASR
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see


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