Old Hard Drive

[Charles Curley]

On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 01:59:36PM +0000, Jim Douglas wrote:
> I have an FC4 install on an old hard drive that has all my config setting 
> on it,
> 
> My new FC5 install on a new hard drive complete.
> 
> How can I mount the old hard drive so I can copy the settings and 
> eventually use it for backups?
> 

This is where Fedora's policy on labeling partitions come in for
criticism. Fedora labels a partition according to where it will be
mounted. So your home partition (/home) is always labeled "/home".

If you have the same partitioning scheme on two hard drives,
installing them on the same machine would be a disaster. You MUST
change the labels on one or the other.

So the first step is to get yourself a live CD linux. I use finnix for
this sort of thing.

Then shut down, unplug the new hard drive, and plug the old one,
leaving it temporarily set up as a single drive. Boot to the live CD
and change the labels. "[man|info] tune2fs" and search on "label" for
details.

That done, re-rig the old hard drive as appropriate.

* If you don't have an IDE CD-ROM drive as master on the secondary IDE
  controller, leave the old hard drive as a single drive and plug it
  into the secondary controller. It will show up as /dev/hdc. That's
  what I do on my desktop, which has a SCSI CD-ROM drive.

* If you do have an IDE CD-ROM drive, chances are it is the secondary
  master. In that case, re-rig the old drive as a slave and plug it
  into the primary IDE controller cable, along with the new drive. It
  will show up as /dev/hdb.

Also check the jumpers on the new drive. It is probably rigged as a
single drive. This is usually (but not always) the same as the
jumpering for a master. If necessary, change it to be a master.

Boot. You should come up to the new drive.

Edit /etc/fstab as appropriate. Be sure to make the mounts ro until
you are done pulling what you want off of it. From my fstab:

# old system..
/dev/hdc3       /mnt/oldsys         ext3    owner,ro    1 2
/dev/hdc7       /mnt/oldsys/home    ext3    owner,ro    1 2
/dev/hdc8       /mnt/oldsys/crcmisc ext3    owner,ro    1 2

Then create the old root partition's mount point:

mkdir -p /mnt/oldsys

You should then be able to mount, starting with the old root
partition.

Once you are sure everything is working, shut down and install the
hard drives back into the case and close it up.

-- 

Charles Curley                  /"\    ASCII Ribbon Campaign
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