Stephen A. Witt wrote: > I'm trying to figure out how to clone the root partition of a Debian Linux > installation.
[I recently moved my Debian/Windows system from a 9 GB hard drive to a nice new 30 GB hard drive. Here is a draft of a short tutorial based on my (mis)-adventure. I welcome any technical, organizational, or grammatical feedback.] With hard drive price/GB continuing to drop, you may be thinking of replacing that old 8.4 GB drive with a new 30 GB model. You probably do not, however, want to reinstall Windows or Linux on the new hard drive. This tutorial will attempt to walk you through moving your Windows 9x and/or Linux system to a new hard drive using nothing but a couple of floppy disks. Before we start, here is what you will need: 1. Printout of current hard drive partitions (in Linux, run `fdisk -l /dev/hda`, assuming you are replacing hda) 2. Printout of `df -h`. This will show you how much free space you have on each partition. This will help you determine how big the new partitions on the new hard drive should be. (I am assuming that you have your Windows partitions mounted; otherwise you will need to get the Windows information from within Windows.) 2. Printout of /etc/fstab file. 3. Windows 95 or 98 Start Up floppy (you will not need cdrom support). 4. One floppy with tomsrtbt on it. Tomsrtbt is a mini Linux distribution that fits on one floppy. You can get it at: http://www.toms.net/rb/. If you do not have tomsrtbt, you should get it. It has saved me a couple of times. If you are adding a hard with more than 1024 cylinders (about 9 GB, I think), make sure that your /boot partition (or root partition if you do not use a separate /boot partition) will be entirely below 1024 cylinders. If the /boot partition (or root partition) will extend past 1024 cylinders, then make sure that your choice of a boot-loader will work. For me, LILO 21.5-1 beta worked fine above 1024 cylinders. Okay, now you can install that new hard drive. I installed the new drive as primary master (aka /dev/hda) and changed the old drive to primary slave (hdb). I have a cdrom on secondary master (hdc). First, lets move Windows over to the new disk. (I have used this method for Win95 and Win98; it may or may not work for other MS flavors.) Boot up with that Win9x Start Up floppy. At the dos prompt, run fdisk. If you get a question about enabling large disk support, you probably want to answer yes. Now you need to create a primary dos partition. From the information I printed out about my old hard drive, I knew that I had a 4 GB partition for Win9x and was using 68% of the partition. On the new hard drive (which fdisk identifies as disk 1), I created a 4.5 GB primary dos partition and marked it active (bootable) since the old Windows partition was marked bootable. Finally, display partition information and make sure that everything is the way you want it to be. If all is well, you can exit fdisk. Since this is Windows, it must be time to reboot. When the Win9x Start Up floppy reboots, you will need to format the new Windows partition with `fdisk c:` Once c: is formatted, you can take the Windows floppy out and reboot with the tomsrtbt floppy. Once you log into tomsrtbt, you will need to create two mount points where you can mount the old and new Windows partitions. I did the following: mkdir /mnt/old /mnt/new I mounted the old partition with: mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1 /mnt/old (where hdb1 is the old windows partition) I mounted the new partition with: mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/new (where hda1 is the new windows partition) Change to the old windows directory: cd /mnt/old Now we are ready to copy the old partition to the new partition. Take your pick as to how you copy the old to the new. tar cf - . | (cd /mnt/new; tar xvf - ) or cp -vaf . /mnt/new or find . | cpio -puvmdB /mnt/new Assuming that there are no errors, all that is left to do is to umount /mnt/old and /mnt/new, remove tomsrtbt floppy, and reboot. You should boot right into Windows. If you cannot boot Windows, boot off the Windows9x Start Up floppy and run `sys c:` at the dos prompt. Remove the floppy and reboot your new Windows partition. When Windows is up and running, you should probably run scandisk just to make sure everything is OK. Now that you have Windows running, let's get Linux installed. Boot tomsrtbt again. We need to create partitions for our Linux system on the new hard drive: fdisk /dev/hda Looking at the partition scheme from your old hard drive and create as many ext2 and swap partitions as you will need. The printout of `df -h` will give you an idea of how large to make your partitions. For example, if your old /home partition was 90% full, you should probably make the new /home partition larger, especially if your new hard drive is significantly larger than the old hard drive. This next step is very important. Write down the locations and names of the old and new partitions. You will need this information, and you do not want to get the partitions mixed up. Here is my partition information: hda2 = new swap hdb2 = old swap hda5 = new /home hdb3 = old /home hda6 = new /usr hdb5 = old /usr hda7 = new / hdb6 = old / Note: All the new partitions should be on the primary master drive (hda), and all the old partitions should be on the primary slave drive (hdb). You then need to format the partitions. I did the following: mkswap /dev/hda2 (for the swap partition) mke2fs /dev/hda5 (for /home) mke2fs /dev/hda6 (for /usr) mke2fs /dev/hda7 ( for /) Now we need to mount the old and new partitions and copy from old partition to new partition. First we need to create mount points /mnt/old and /mnt/new: mkdir /mnt/old /mnt/new Now we can mount the old and new /home partitions, using the old and new partition information that you wrote down earlier: mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb3 /mnt/old mount -t ext2 /dev/hda5 /mnt/new Type `mount` and double check that all is correctly mounted. If so, then: cd /mnt/old And choose one method: tar cf - . | (cd /mnt/new; tar xvf - ) or cp -vaf . /mnt/new or find . | cpio -puvmdB /mnt/new When you have successfully moved /home, then umount /mnt/old and /mnt/new, mount the next pair of old and new partitions (in my case /usr). I handled the root (/) partition last because we have to edit a couple of files after copying the old root to the new root. Since we are using tomsrtbt, we can use emacs or vi to edit files. Edit /etc/fstab on the new root (/) partition (it should be mounted at /mnt/new) and change the partition names to correspond to their new locations. Next, edit /etc/lilo.conf to identify the new root partition. Now you need to run lilo, but we need to run it with chroot. With the new root partition mounted at /mnt/new, run this: chroot /mnt/new lilo -v Note: When I ran this, I got the dreaded 1024 cylinder error. I then went back into /etc/lilo and added `linear` to the global options section. Re-running `chroot /mnt/new lilo -v` gave me another error that suggested I try lba32. I then removed `linear` and added `lba32` to /etc/lilo.conf. One final `chroot /mnt/new lilo -v` worked. Take tomsrtbt out and reboot. You should shortly be looking at a LILO: prompt. If all went well, your old hard drive is now ready to be removed. Credits: Thanks to Tom Oehser for tomsrtbt, "The most GNU/Linux on one floppy disk." Additional thanks to Tom Oehser for recommending the `cp -vaf` method as the one he would use with tomsrtbt. The tar trick comes from pp. 193-194 of Running Linux, 3rd Edition, by Welsh, Dalheimer & Kaufman. -- David Raeker-Jordan mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Harrisburg, PA, USA
