Moving / mountpoint

[Paul Howarth]

Garry Harthill wrote:
>>I'd suggest making the partition on the new disk the same size or bigger
>>than the old root partition and then using "dd" to copy the actual
>>partition across rather than mounting the filesystem and using a regular
>>copy tool. This will ensure that an exact copy is made. You can then use
>>resize2fs to expand the new root filesystem to fill its partition, and
>>tune2fs to change the filesystem label - otherwise you'll have two
>>filesystems labelled "/", which will confuse the kernel.
> 
> 
> Is tune2fs nessercery if grub.conf is using "root=/dev/hdc2" and not
> using a label.

Correct, it wouldn't be necessary. However, if instead of editing your 
existing grub.conf entry, you copied it and then edited the copy (so 
that old and new were still present), you'd then have a choice of which 
root partition to boot using, which might be nice to have if something 
prevented the copy from working properly. Since the original entry used 
a filesystem label, it would be wise to ensure that there wasn't a 
duplicate label around, hence using tune2fs to change the label on the copy.

> Also if I go with a file copy (cp -a for example) this
> doesn't do anything with the labels so there wouldn't be a problem? Is
> this correct?

Yes, that's correct. Using dd would be significantly faster though.

> I'm just trying to cover all bases and understand this a bit better. Sorry :)

Perfectly understandable.

Paul.