New hard drive

[Avi Greenbury]

Mark Panen wrote:
> i want to purchase a new hard drive and basically install 12.04 LTS
> from scratch when it is released but i want to copy my /home
> from /dev/sda onto the new hardrive and make the new hard drive
> bootable.
> 
> Any pointers please?
 
The notion of a 'bootable hard drive' doesn't really exist in Linux;
all disks are equally bootable-from, that's largely a hangover from
MS-DOS which was picky about partitions.

The simplest way would be to:
* Buy the new disk and install it
* Create your desired partition layout on it
* Copy the contents of /home into the right place
* Remove the other disk
* Install Precise on the remaining (new) disk

When you install you have the option of not formatting /home, which
means that you'll get a new system installed on the other partitions
and /home will be left largely untouched.

There'll be a couple of files that you'd want to delete or move, in
order that new ones for new versions of things are created, but
precisely what they are wont be fully known until the release of 12.04.
They'll also vary with how much of your current environment you wish to
preserve; they're just personal configuration files for things like
Gnome.

-- 
Avi