Upgrading to SCSI without reinstalling?

Oopsz · Guru Joined: 08 Oct 2002 Posts: 340

For my gentoo box, i've picked up a scsi controller and hard drive (nothing fancy, but it's definitely faster than the 2 gig 5400 rpm drive I have in there now). I really, really don't want to reinstall the OS just for a new hard drive. Would there be any major problems if I boot from livecd, partition the new drive, and cp files from /mnt/hda1 to /mnt/sda1 and /mnt/hda3 to /mnt/sda3? (my boot and root partitions, respectively. hda2 is swap.)

Then I can update fstab, boot from the scsi drive using a grub floppy and reinstall the bootloader.

Should this work, or am I missing something? boot is ext3, root is reiser, if that matters. The new disk is 8gigs (if it was the same size, i'd just dd the entire drive

)

tomaw · Guru Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 429 Location: UK

I would be tempted to boot from a CD with the drives installed then:

cat /dev/hda1 > /dev/sda1 etc etc

then adjust the fstab, install grub etc.

Can't see why that wouldn't work. Only suggesting that because I recall there could be problems with symbolic links, but I may well be wrong.

Tom

Oopsz · Guru Joined: 08 Oct 2002 Posts: 340

Well, the partitions won't be the same size... How will the filesystems deal with that?

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20093

Moved from Installing Gentoo.
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Quis separabit? Quo animo?

tomaw · Guru Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 429 Location: UK

they won't. probably the best would be to use tar in that case. if anyone else reads this then I could well have been wrong about the links not being happy with copy.

Either that or you could create the partitions the same size, then grow them after. If you create the partitions so their starting block is the same as where they will finally be then it will simplify the growing process. GNU parted should work for this.

Tom

Oopsz · Guru Joined: 08 Oct 2002 Posts: 340

tar cvfp - /mnt/hda1 | tar xvfp /mnt/sda1

just like that?

ronmon · Posted: Mon May 12, 2003 8:45 pm Post subject:

The Mini How-To is kind of old, but it still works if you adapt a little. On this page he shows three ways to do the copying. The second way has worked for me on two occasions.