[H-GEN] I'm stumped.......

Michael Anthon anthonm at tams.com.au
Wed May 20 23:04:47 EDT 1998


Well, I have been trying unsuccessfully to do something and am finally
giving up and asking......

Here is the situation.  I have a 210M HDD with a working Sparc/Linux
install on it.  I have another 400ishM disk with nothing on it.
What I want to do is to transfer the working system onto the 400M drive
and then swap the drives (only room for 1 drive in the box, but I can
connect the second drive externally (temporarily)).

Now, thanks to the helpful people in #humbug, I have tried several
things.....

1. Reboot from a floppy, create the partitions on the new HDD (swap and
linux native), mount both drives and then use the following  (cd /d1 &&
tar cf - . ) | ( cd /d2 && tar xfvp - )
This seems to copy all the stuff over ok, but the result is that the
size has grown from about 99M to 135M.  This is possibly due to hard
links being copied twice (or more) ??  I don't really know.  A more
serious problem is that when I then run e2fsck on the new disk, I get
HEAPS of errors.  Errr.. well, I did last night, just tried again and
only got a few that didn't seem too serious, but it's still a lot bigger
than it should be.

2. Create a Linux Native partition on the new disk of a size just
slightly larger than the old disk (can't get it exact due to the number
of sectors on each disk) the use "dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1".  This
doesn't work.  The data is copied over, but it also seems to overwrite
the partition table.  I would have thought copying sda1 would not copy
the partition table, but I think there are also extra copies of the
table repeated through the disk isn't there ?

OK, well, 2 things, with several variations of each thrown in.  Now, the
question is, HOW do you actually do this (I'm assuming here that it IS
possible of course).  And once all the info is copied over, what do I
need to do with SILO to get it to boot from the new disk ?

TIA
Michael Anthon

TAMS Systems



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