Migrate Ubuntu to a bigger disk on a laptop

[Asif Iqbal]

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 11:04 PM, Rick Bragg <rbragg at gmnet.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-02-21 at 16:34 -0500, Asif Iqbal wrote:
>> Hi All
>>
>> I have ubuntu 8.10 running on my laptop. It is a 40gb disk. I want to
>> upgrade it to 250gb drive.
>>
>> I am thinking of doing the migration like this
>>
>> 1. copy over my home dir to another machine on same subnet using tar/ssh
>> 2. generate a list of all the pkgs and save it on a file on another machine
>> 3. boot from a liveCD and wipe the disk clean
>> 4. replace the 40g disk with new 250g disk
>> 5. fresh install ubuntu 8.10
>> 6. copy my home dir content back from remote machine
>> 7. take the pkg list file from remote machine and pipe it through
>> aptitude to install all the new pkgs
>>
>> Am I missing anything?
>>
>> Now what is the best way to do step 2 and step 7?
>>
>> Also what is the best method of wipe clean a hard drive in step 3?
>>
>> How do I make sure the rc scripts are setup same way? There are few
>> apps where I ran
>> the `sudo update-rc.d -f <appname> remove'. So the rc scripts are not
>> at default state
>>
>> Thanks for your help
>>
>> --
>> Asif Iqbal
>> PGP Key: 0xE62693C5 KeyServer: pgp.mit.edu
>> A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
>> Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
>
>
>
> I have done the following before and it worked great.  It seems like
> allot, but for me this was the easiest way, and I knew everything that
> happend.
>
> * On your current laptop, as root, run something like the following to
> back up your laptop to a remote machine:
>
> tar -zcvpf - / --exclude-from /path/tar.exclude | ssh user at backuphost "( cat > /path/to/backup.tar.gz )"

It needs more space than I have available. But I will give this a try
for some other test machine

>
> *** In your tar.exclude file (above), put something like this:
> /dev/*
> /proc/*
> /mnt/*/*
> /sys/*
> /var/tmp/ccache/*
>
> After you run that, your entire system should be backed up.  (keep your
> old hard drive aside in case something goes wrong)
>
> Then:
> * replace the drive with the new one,
> * boot up the laptop from a live CD,
> * partition your new drive with cfdisk, make it bootable, and mount it
> somewhere, don't forget to make a swap partition as well.
> * copy the tar file back onto the new mounted drive with scp. Something
> like:
> scp user at backuphost//path/to/backup.tar.gz /mnt/newdrive/.
> * untar it with:
> cd /mnt/newdrive
> tar zxvpf backup.tar.gz
>
> reboot.
>
> Assuming that you have just a root partition, and a swap partition,
> things should go well, if you have a separate boot partition, make sure
> to mount that in the right place before you untar the backup.  If
> everything works, you can remove the backup.tar.gz from your root
> directory.
>
> Thoughts?
> Thanks!
> rick
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Asif Iqbal
PGP Key: 0xE62693C5 KeyServer: pgp.mit.edu
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?