Questions about moving Ubuntu to a new hard drive

[Luis Mondesi]

Hello,

On 4/15/07, Craig Hagerman <craighagerman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I am running out of space on my computer and thinking of replacing one of
> the hard drives with something much bigger. Right now I have an 80 GB ATA
> drive, a 250 GB SATA and a 300 GB SATA. Ubuntu root (and everything else
> Ubuntu - I don't put /home etc on a different partition) is on the 80 GB
> along with a Windows XP partition (half and half). I am thinking about
> replacing the 80 GB with a 500 GB drive. What I am wondering is:
>
> (1) what is the best way to move Ubuntu to a new hard drive? Will
> something like "cp -pR" work? Or should I do a bit-for-bit copy (with dd?).
> If I copy the 80 GB and then replace it with a 500GB ATA I assume that it
> will have the same address and I can leave Grub alone. Is this correct? If I
> instead put in a new SATA drive, can I just alter the grub boot file and
> everything will be OK?



man tar

from old drive to new drive mounted on /mnt/new_drive

cd /mnt/new_drive
tar --exclude='*new_drive*' cf - / | tar xf -

That's assuming that the new drive is formatted correctly and all your
partitions are mounted properly.

(2) Are there any issues involved with using an SATA drive to boot from. I
> seem to remember there were some issues a couple years ago when I first
> built this computer... but I can't remember what it was any more? Maybe it
> was that windows doesn't (or didn't) like to boot from SATA? If the new root
> drive is SATA will I face any difficulties I wouldn't with ATA?



After Edgy there are no issues with SATA disks. They are just seen as
regular SCSI disks, same like ATA and everything else.  If your BIOS
supports booting from SATA disks, then you should have no problems.

I'll suggest that you use LVM on your new disk. You can do this by creating
a 200MB /boot partition and a volume group for your Ubuntu installation (for
a Desktop you don't really need a partition for /home).

The beauty about LVM is that later when you decide to add another disk to
your computer, you don't have to do anything. to transfer your files. Just
add the disk and grow the partition (span between the two disks).

There is a lot of literature about LVM online. Try Howtoforge and The Linux
Documentation Project (TLDP). Google is your friend.

Regards,

-- 
----)(-----
Luis Mondesi
*NIX Guru

"Feliz el hombre que ha hallado sabiduria y el hombre que consigue
discernimiento, porque el tenerla como ganancia es mejor que tener la plata
como ganancia; y el tenerla como producto, [mejor] que el oro mismo" (Prov
3:13-14)
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