Questions about moving Ubuntu to a new hard drive

[Scott Medling]

Windows XP (even SP2) can be difficult to install on a SATA drive if you
don't have a floppy for a driver disk.  Luis is right about the LVM bit,
it's not too hard to get going, and it can save you lots of work in the
future.

It is my opinion that the easiest thing to do is to leave / (root) on your
80GB ATA and make your new drive /home so all you need to move over are your
files.  This is all based on the assumption that most of your data is in
your /home folder and that your root directory won't be needing to expand
any time soon.

-Scott

On 4/15/07, Luis Mondesi <lemsx1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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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