New HDD

[Avi Greenbury]

pete smout wrote:
> Failing this is there a way of 'cloneing' my current HDD onto the new
> one so I can then upgrade from 13.04 to 13.10?

Yeah, the general principle is to boot into single-user mode and then
copy the full contents of the current disk onto the new one. It used to
be that you'd create a filesystem on the new disk, mount it somewhere
and copy the entire contents of the current one to it, install grub and
reboot:

# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
# mkdir /mnt/from /mnt/to
# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/to
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/from
# rsync -avz /mnt/from/ /mnt/to
# grub-install /dev/sdb

And then you'd have a complete system on the new disk[0]. It's a bit
more complicated now that grub and fstab use UUIDs rather than
traditional /dev/ paths - there's an additional step whereby you edit
the configuration files appropriately. Exactly what you need to do
depends on your filesystem layout (and for some the above wont be
correct, either); if you're up for doing it this way could you describe
your partitions layout and I'll send you what you need to do?


-- 
Avi

[0] mounting your / (/dev/sda1) again means you don't need to bother
excluding all the mountpoints that would be required were you to rsync
/: /dev, /proc, /sys etc.