I have 3 hard drives on my main machine. Because of their history, I have parts ended up with /, parts of /usr, and /home spread across the three drives. I have just freed up some space, and I'd like to get the 3 drives down to 2 so that I can use the third for a new box I'm building to play with Debian.
I've planned most of the steps of the move, but I need some (hopefully simple) advice. 1) I'm going to have to move /, /usr, and /home during this migration. In all cases, I will be moving them to another hard drive on the same machine. What is the best way to move the data? I'd like to preserve symlinks, permissions, modtimes, and such. A simple cp -p? Something more fancy? Speed isn't crucial since I have all day, but correctness and not losing anything is. I have a bunch of unused space in /opt if I need to temporarily dump some data locally (for example, if the best approach is to dump(8) /home there and then restore(8) it to a new location). 2) The drive that currently houses my root partition (which includes /boot) is the one that's going away. Do I need to do anything special when moving my root partition? Do I just copy the data and then toggle the bootable flag in fdisk? 3) Does grub have the old "1024 cylinder" limitation that LILO had? I've always separated / and /usr in the past so that / will be small and can fit under the 1024th cylinder. I'd love to drop that restriction since otherwise I'll need to repartition a disk that has a lot of data on it. Thanks, ---Tom -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
