Matt --
It is feasible. Exactly how to do it is a bit tricky, though. There are
multiple ways, each with some problems of detail. I'd suggest the following:
1. Boot from a rescue disk that gives you a RAM disk root partition.
2. Mount the existing root partition at the mount point /old, and mount any
other old partitions at points that correspond to their usual places (e.g.,
mount what is normally /var as /old/var). You'll need to make this mount
point ("mkdir /old").
3. Mount the new root partition at /new (you'll need to make this as well),
and mount any other new partitions at points that will correspond to their
new places (see example above).
4. Run the copy command as "cp -a /old /new". Read the man page for cp to
get an explanation of the -a flag.
5. Turn everything off, remove the old drive, and set up the new drive to be
IDE primary master (hda). (This assumes you are using IDE disks. If you're
using SCSI, do whatever is appropriate to your setup to make the new drive
the boot drive.)
6. Reboot with a rescue disk, this time using the disk to mount the hard
disk partition as root.
7. Run lilo to install the lilo boot loader on the new disk.
8. Reboot the system, and it should boot Linux from the new drive.
I'm sorry that steps 1 and 6 are a bit vague. Rescue disks vary a lot, and
since I don't know what distribution you are using, I don't know what rescue
disk you are likely to be using.
At 06:21 PM 7/5/00 GMT, Matt Dangel wrote:
>
>Greetings All.
>
>I have a hard drive that is making a good bit of noise and I fear is about
>to crater. I am hoping to put another hard drive in the machine and try to
>copy everything over and discard the old drive. Is this feasable? I have
>the drive partitioned into /home, /usr, /tmp, /var and /. I imagine that
>most user files would tolerate a vanilla cp command, but am not sure about
>that. Is there a utility that will "mirror" a hard drive/ partition? Am I
>going about this the wrong way? Any suggestions would be *greatly*
>appreciated.
--
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
----------------------------------------------------------------
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
