hard replacement

[Thomas Sperre]

Sundag 12 november 2006 21:03 skreiv Rodney D. Myers:
> A friend of mine is getting ready to upgrade his "/" partition, which
> is very small, onto a larger hard drive.
>
> Short of a re-install, how is the best way to move the "/" from the
> small hard drive to the larger hard drive?
>
> Thanks

If you google around a little, I am sure you can find some advice. I know I at 
least wrote something somewhere, but right now I cannot remember if it was at 
kubuntuforums, ubuntuforums or some other place. I will try something out of 
the top of my head, and then hopefully others will join in and correct me 
where I go wrong.

I assume that you have both disk partitions  mounted at the start of the 
procedure. I will name them old root and new root below. I also assume that 
you have proper backup of everything you need to have backed up!


The general procedure:
1. copy contents of "old root" partition to "new root" partition
2. unmount "/" (which was "old root") 
3. mount "new root" as "/"
4. optionally mount "old root"  as some other moount point (not "/") 

Assuming again that you are familiar with the mounting and unmounting, the 
copying of a possibly large data volume (step 1) is the tricky thing here. 
IMHO the best option for this is not "cp" but rsync command.

I recommend "rsync -As". There are a few trickies on how to write the source 
and target adress, check the man page for detailed info.