[DONE] Best/safest way to move / from one HDD to another?

freke · Last edited by freke on Wed Aug 19, 2015 2:51 pm; edited 1 time in total

I have a PCEngines APU1D4 with a SDD (sda)+ a HDD (sdb).

Currently booting off the sdb (grub2) and / on sdb - I'm considering a move to the SDD, what would be the safest/correct way to make the move?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Aug 18, 2015 7:36 pm Post subject:

freke,

You need to read up about stage4. That's making a backup of your install, then restoring it.
The steps are the same but if you are careful, you may not need a backup.
Backups are always a good idea.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

freke · Posted: Wed Aug 19, 2015 11:11 am Post subject:

Thx... more or less forgot about stage4 (yeah - I happen to cry when my HDDs die:))

Doesn't seem to bad time-wise - ~45mins for the test tar I just did, I don't like extended downtime on the box as it's running my dns/dhcp/mail - I expect the untar to be quicker and then more or less just a reboot (after modifying grub and fstab) from /dev/sda instead of /dev/sdb....

Naib · Posted: Wed Aug 19, 2015 12:00 pm Post subject:

Not too long ago I did a similar thing (for my /home drive and for my /<root> drive)

Each time I used rsync to copy the data. /home was done 1st & then that partition was umounted, fstab updated & remounted
Once that was confirmed to be valid /<root> was initiated, grub re-written

Power down. swap drive channels, boot.
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ct85711 · Veteran Joined: 27 Sep 2005 Posts: 1791

I actually did this not too long ago on my system, moving my root partition to a ssd drive partition. I simply just booted into a livecd environment (systemrescue cd), mounted both drives, and did a straight cp (don't recall the flags I used right off hand) from one to another; adjusted my fstab and rebuilt my grub2 and no issues. (Of course the new partition was already setup for the same fs, ext4).

This wasn't my first time, just using plain old cp to copy everything over (I made sure the new setup worked before wiping the old partition).

freke · Posted: Wed Aug 19, 2015 2:53 pm Post subject:

All (seemingly) went well

Thx for the stage4 pointer