Copying old Gentoo install over network using livecd

[MatchASM]

The following is a basic description of the situation:

An old disk drive containing my previous install is inside a spare PC, because the new PC's PSU does not have the (over-)capacity to power it. I thought I would make a network connection between the two using a crossed UTP cable and copy the entire old partition (/etc, /home, /tmp, /usr, /var) onto the new drive, so I would not have to reinstall or reconfigure everything again.

The initial plan was to use scp for the task, but it keeps getting into infinite loops due to symlinks, besides copying them as though the symlinks were real. An internet connection on either PC is currently not an option.

So, any solutions using only standard livecd tools?

[GoofballJM1]

I would hook up the old drive directly, mount it, create all the directories found in / , and copy using cp -a for each directory. Once the copy is complete, chroot into the system you just copied and reinstall grub on the MBR. It might require more steps than what you are looking for, but it has worked for me on a number of occasions. I copied my server install from a single ide drive to a RAID 1 SATA array a few months ago without any hiccups.

Copying over the network would be slower, and you would have to set up NFS in order for you to get access to the drive. Hooking the drive directly removes all of that.
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"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds." - Albert Einstein

[MatchASM]

Hooking up the drive directly was out of the question because it would cause the PSU to stop functioning...

I ended up using scp for all the movies and music (the main space consumers), deleting them on the old disk and then use tar to copy symlink and ownership information for the remaining data.

I heard that tar over ssh is possible without using temporary disk space, but I still don't know how to do something like that.

[nitbix]

Maybe rsync could have been a good idea.
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.:nitbix:.

[cyrillic]