> Disk /dev/sdb: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes > 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders > Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes > Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
A small caveat -- if this is an "advanced format" drive be sure to use fdisk in sector mode (fdisk -uc) and start the first partition on a sector number which is a multiple of 8. (Yes, I know it says "512 bytes physical sector size" above, but all five of my 1TB AF WD greens happily advertise a 512 byte physical sector size) >> Ok now I was going to use same reiserfs < no big deal> >> unless I can use reiser4? good idea? <discuss-caveats> Assuming you care about your data, my advice is to drop reiserfs for everything but unimportant, easily replaceable stuff (like /usr/portage). Reiserfs undoubtedly has performance advantages in some areas, but its structure is more prone to damage and it has lousy fs utils. Ext4 might be slower at times but it is backed by a very well tested and maintained fsck. Reiser4? Not a chance in hell. > Just replace "/dev/sdb1" with "LABEL=boot" Small caveat: labels in /etc/fstab are ok (even for swap partitions, just create them with mkswap -L), but you must still use a device name in the "root" parameter on the kernel command line. Labels/UUIDs are not supported there. > Another approach (less readable but arguably less easy to break) is > using "UUID=...". You can find these out with dumpe2fs. I guess > something similar exists for reiserfs, as well. or just ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid >> dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32768 Definitely not. Sure, you can grow the fs to fill the partition aftwerwards (resize2fs or its reiser equivalent), but you will be wasting time and taking unnecessary risks. Boot from a livecd, create a new filesystem on the target, mount both filesystems and use rsync -aHPv /path/to/old/mountpoint/ /path/to/new/mountpoint/ or simply tar c /path/to/old/ | tar xvp /path/to/new rsync can show you the progress of the operation, which is nice, but it is not available on all live cds (for example, gentoo-minimal did not ship with it last time I checked). If you use rsync, pay special attention to the -H option as -a (archive mode) does not preserve hard links by default. HTH, andrea
