>> I decided to upgrade the internal drive, so I hooked up the new on on
>> the CD's usual SATA channel and installed, having adjust the disklabel
>> more to suit me (the auto partition of /usr left it really tight on
>> space, and home was not big enough).
>>
>> First method: mount all the slices in /tree and run a series of cp -R
>> as root. Files seemed to get there but something was not right with
>> permissions when I tried booting the new disk, so I dropped back and
>> did some research.
>>
>> Reinstalled, mounted the new slices as before, and ran:
>>
>> #!/bin/sh
>>
>> tar -cXf - /* | tar -xpf - -C /tree
>> tar -cXf - /home/* | tar -xpf - -C /tree/home
>> tar -cXf - /usr/* | tar -xpf - -C /tree/usr
>> tar -cXf - /usr/X11R6/* | tar -xpf - -C /tree/usr/X11R6
>> tar -cXf - /usr/local/* | tar -xpf - -C /tree/usr/local
>> tar -cXf - /usr/obj/* | tar -xpf - -C /tree/usr/obj
>> tar -cXf - /usr/src/* | tar -xpf - -C /tree/usr/src
>> tar -cXf - /var/* | tar -xpf - -C /tree/var
>>
>> I had copied the new disk's fstab so that the duids were right when I
>> started from it.
>>
>> Results were interesting. I got another copy of /home
>> inside /tree/home, as well as what I wanted in it, and youtube-dl
>> turns out to make filenames too long for tar. Nevertheless, I could log
>> in as myself. But running my usual packages at login didn't work: file
>> not found.
>>
>> Should I have not tried to save that much time? I thought tar | tar
>> would get everything. Do I need to install the packages on the new
>> disk? Is this a time that pkg_check is my friend?
>
>pax -rw -pe was what you wanted. Possibly with the -k option too.
If you are intending to do this filesystem-by-filesystem, you may
experience better results using the dump & restore tools, in a form
something like:
cd /new/filesystem && dump 0af - /filesystem | restore -f -
