Migrate from IDE to SATA

[Constantine Evans]

That depends on how technically competent you are. Since you have a 
separate /boot partition and an XFS root partition, I will assume you 
have a reasonably high level of technical ability.

You should just be able to migrate in the following way:
1) Partition the new drive with a similar partition scheme
1a) Mount the new root partition somewhere
1b) Create the /boot directory in it and mount the new boot partition there.
2) Copy everything over to the new partitions except /sys, /dev and 
/proc, using cp -a (be sure to use -a here)
3) Create those three directories (just with mkdir)
4) Edit /etc/fstab on the new root partition to point to the SATA drive 
instead of the IDE drive.
5) Install grub on the new drive (With something like grub-install 
--root-directory=/mnt/newroot /dev/sda)
6) Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst in the new boot partition to point to the 
new drive.
	a) Change the root option in the default kernel options to point to the 
new root partition
	b) Change the root option for grub to point to the new drive. This 
might be tricky due to grub's numbering scheme, depending on what you 
are doing with the old drive. If you are removing it, you might not need 
to change anything.
	c) Run update-grub on the new partition's menu.lst. It appears that you 
will have to use chroot to do so (I think chroot /mnt/newroot 
/sbin/update-grub will work)
7) Reboot, and hope that everything works. If grub isn't set up 
correctly, remember that you can always go to the grub menu and press e 
to temporarily change the grub configuration for the selected option.

Amit Prahesh wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> my machine always had a 40G PATA hard disk unto which I installed 
> Kubuntu 6.06, taking all the disk (one little ext3 partition for /boot, 
> the swap partition, and the rest of the disk is an XFS partition for /).
> 
> Now, I have a new 80G SATA disk that I'd like to use as the system disk 
> (of course, the motherboard has support).
> 
> What's the easiest way to transfer everything from the IDE disk to the 
> SATA (while keeping everything)?
> 
> Amit.
>