help with changing hard disks

[Matt Price]

On Mon, 2007-21-05 at 03:15 -0400, Perry Heath wrote:
> Good Day:
> We have a dual boot P4 with Windows 2000 installed on the first ide
> hdd and Ubuntu 6.10 LTS installed on the 2nd. Since Ubuntu does
> everything we need so well, we no longer require the other OS. We wish
> to recover the space on the first hdd and give it to Ubuntu, but we
> need to do it without disturbing the contents of the current Ubuntu
> installation, if at all possible. We're pretty sure that grub is
> installed to the first hdd. 
> 
> Our question then is; Is this possible, and if so, can you help us
> discover how please ?
> 
this is almost certainly possible.  how you do it depends on your setup
and what exactly you want to do.   

first, make absolutely sure you have everything you need off of your old
windows partition 9doubtless you've done this already).

second, make a full packup of your ubuntu syste if you can (if you
can't, then DEFINITELY use method number 1).

then do one of the following:

1)  if your ubuntu system does not use LVM, and/or you don't mind using
the space on disk 0 as a seperate partition:

- boot into ubuntu
- start up gparted, which will tell you about your disks.
- wipe disk 0 clean
- create new partition(s) on disk 0
- mount these partitions automatically by creating lines in /etc/fstab
along these lines:
/dev/hda1    /mnt/newdisk    ext3  defaults   0   0

and then you're done.  

2)  if your system uses LVM, then you can add the space on disk 0 to
your currently existing install.  you should do this from a livecd like
knoppix or the ubuntu live system.  again, BACKUP YOUR DATA FIRST.  then
it's a pretty simple matter to use the command-line tools to add disk 0
to your existing volume group, extend the logical volume to that disk,
extend the ext3 filesystem to use all of the newly available space.
then when you reboot into your system, you should be in good shape.  

but NOTE:  if your /boot/grub/menu.lst has uuid identifiers in it like
these:
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-8-generic
root=UUID=2ef5a2dd-1703-47cf-87ae-36a8645c15c8 ro resume=/dev/sda5
single

then you will need to change them to mapper identifiers, like this:

kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-8-generic root=/dev/mapper/Ubuntu
ro resume=/dev/sda5 single

because the newly extended partition will have a new uuid.  you should
be able to find out the correct mapper name using 

ls /dev/mapper/

from the command line.  

if you want more detailed instructions write again, i or someone else
can clarify the necessary steps further (rushed right now).

matt

> Perry.
-- 
Matt Price
History Dept
University of Toronto
matt.price at utoronto.ca
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