Upgrade Hard Drive

Timothy Murphy gayleard at eircom.net
Thu Jan 10 13:22:45 UTC 2008


Tom Spec wrote:

> I am planning to move from one HD to another I need a bit of feedback.  I
> am partitioned as follows:
> 
> sda1 /boot (Linux Partition) 256M
> sda2 LVM PV (Linux LVM Partition) 20G
> 
> I was planning to.....
> 
> 1) attach the new HD
> 2) boot to a rescue CD
> 3) partition the new HD exactly how the old one is
> 4) dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1
> 5) dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sdb2
> 6) make the new HD bootable
> 7) disconnect the old HD
> 8) boot
> 
> My questions...
> 
> - Is this basically the right procedure?

In my opinion dd is not the right tool for this.
(I am amazed no-one else has said this.)

I would partition the new disk as you like,
and copy the contents of the old partitions to the new
with "cp -a".

> - Do I need to boot to the rescue CD or would single user (or emergency)
> mode be good enough (in step 2)? - Exactly what steps are required to
> "make the new HD bootable"? - Is there a way for me to make the old hd
> "unbootable" so I can leave it in, but make sure it's the new one that
> boots?

I don't really see any problem.
Assuming you have both disks in the same machine,
you should be able to add a new entry in grub.conf
allowing you to boot from the new disk.
Then you could install grub on the second disk.

[I would actually have two grub entries for each disk,
one with root (hd0,...) and one with root (hd1,...).
Then you could physically change the disks,
and remove the old one if all works OK.]


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland




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