On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 08:38 -0700, Kumar Golap wrote:
Hi All,
I am thinking of migrating my system disk (/usr etc..) to a bigger one
Any ways of how to do that withuot doing a fresh install...
May be its similar to how people may want to clone a system
And more important is that my portage state needs to be remembered so that i can update later without a hitch.
Thanks
Kumar
if you can fit the old disk and the new disk in the same machine its a doddle.
back up!
partition the new disk
make a file system on the new disk
mount the new disk as (say) /newusr
copy the contents of /usr to /newusr, makng sure to preserve ownership and permissions and symlinks
rename /usr to /oldusr
unmount /newusr and mount it as /usr
edit fstab to add the new mount for /usr
reboot to chack it all works as expected
once you are 100% happy, delete /oldusr to free up some space.
I did something similar not toooo long ago. I would boot to a live disk to do it (someone suggested single user, I guess that might work too, but what about root...). There are a couple of gotchas which the tutorial someone suggested might help you with, but it is pretty straightforward. Just don't forget fstab and boot, and you can do everything no probs. I did it with a gentoo live disk I think but it is probably even better with a knoppix. In any case, I lost nothing, and am not an admin, so if you have a backup just give it a crack Nigel.
Cheers
Antoine
ps. remember we are linux and not doze here - so no nasty files hiding somewhere "because the user doesn't know how to take care of his own ..."
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