drive change

[Alan Pope]

On 28 September 2010 23:08, Bill Wright <pegasus at sc.rr.com> wrote:
> how can i change hard drives to another and retain o/s and data
>

Two ways, and two tools I have used recently.

1) Attach both disks, boot off a CD or USB key and use a tool (see
below) to copy from one to the other (making sure you copy the right
direction)
2) Boot from a CD or USB key with only the original disk attached and
backup to some other source (external USB disk, or network device),
then swap the old disk for the new one, and restore the backup.

The first tool I've used to do this is clonezilla. Boot off USB stick
and it has a "disk to disk" copy (for 1) above) option, and also a
"disk to image" and "image to disk" options (for 2) above).
Alternatively I've used GParted which comes on the Ubuntu CD and I
only found out recently it has a "copy/paste" option to copy a
partition from one disk to another. I suspect that you'd probably need
to do some work to get grub reinstalled on the new disk with the
gparted method, so using clonezilla is probably easiest.

Al.