tf wrote: > > hey guys, > > I might put in a 6 gig drive in place of the 1.6 gig drive I'm using > now. My current installation works fine (its me thats "broken"!). is > there a way that I can copy this hd to the new one? I only have a swap > and a root partition on this drive, and will probably want to partion > the 6 gig drive further... > > or should I just bite the bullet, and do a fresh install? (I am getting > some good practice....)
I was surprised by all the responses to this - I've done it a few times without problems. Get your rescue floppy disk out and keep it handy. Connect the new hard disk somewhere on your machine somwhere other than /dev/hda. Run fdisk on it and create the partition structure you want. Make the appropriate partition bootable (first, generally). Reboot - its safer to always reboot after running fdisk. Make the file systems. If any are large, make the swaps first and "swapon" by hand as mke2fs eats memory. Mount your nominated root partiton as /mnt. Go there. Create any directories where you will mount other partitions on the same drive. Mount those other partitions. Create the proc, mnt, tmp and cdrom directories too. Then from /mnt try something like # ( cd / ; tar cf - bin boot dev lib sbin usr var ) | tar xf - This takes a while. (If your linux image is lying around in / instead of being in /boot, you need to copy that too.) Change your future /etc/fstab (currently /mnt/etc/fstab) to mention your new partitions, all relative to /dev/hda. Shut down. Reconnect the new disk as /dev/hda, boot using the rescue floppy; rescue root=/dev/hda, run lilo, shutdown, eject the floppy, boot. However, a reinstall will probably bring less crud with it. Andrew http://counter.li.org/cgi-bin/runscript/display-person.cgi?user=45690