Quoting Krzys Majewski ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > Again on the subject of buying new hardware, I'm looking for a good > way to copy my existing setup to the new machine. So far I can think > of three main types of options. In order of decreasing popularity, they > are: > > 1) Reinstall everything from scratch, then copy my home directory and some > conf files from the old machine to the new machine.
Not a bad idea if, say, you're still on slink and are moving to potato. > 3) Make binary images of the old hard drives, automagically paste these > onto the new hard drive. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure this is impossible. You mention SCSI in the old box, but don't say what's the hardware in the new box. If IDE, you could install the new disk in the old machine, partition it (think about that, of course), mount it on /mnt and copy the files onto it with cd old-directory-root find -xdev | cpio -damp /mnt Then create a boot floppy, rdev the kernel to the future correct device, put the new disk in the new machine, boot it with the floppy and run lilo. > 4) Physically install the old hard drives in the new machine. Make a boot floppy, move the drives, boot with the floppy, copy in the same way as above, rdev the floppy (or a copy), boot again, this time into the new drive, run lilo. Note that the rdev'ing is no longer necessary with potato because it produces a syslinux boot floppy instead of a kernel image. Therefore you can give it parameters like root=/dev/hda1 single which was not possible before. (Of course, with slink and previous, one could copy the kernel onto a rescue disk to get the same effect.) Cheers, -- Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: +44 1908 653 739 Fax: +44 1908 655 151 Snail: David Wright, Earth Science Dept., Milton Keynes, England, MK7 6AA Disclaimer: These addresses are only for reaching me, and do not signify official stationery. Views expressed here are either my own or plagiarised.