[H-GEN] Transferring a RH Linux system from one drive to another

[Anthony Towns]

On Tue, Jan 12, 1999 at 02:30:42PM +1000, Campbell wrote:
> sigh.. Time for me to pick the humbug collective brain again..
> Suppose:
> I am trying to transfer a system from one set of drives to another one.

There are a few problems here, apart from just getting the files across,
mainly related to boot up:
	LILO has to be made to point to the right root device
	/etc/fstab has to be made to point to the right devices

Otherwise, it's not too much of a bother.
 
> 1a: is there a limit on hard drive size for the drive the root partition is 
> on?

Some BIOSes don't like you having your kernel outside the first 500MB
or so.  I usually have a ~10MB /boot partition first on my hard drive,
and stick kernels in there. Otherwise there aren't any restrictions,
though. (AFAIK)

> 2: what would be the best way to transfer a system from 2 small drives, to 
> one large drive (partitioned as necessary)

Turn the machine off. Boot it in single user mode. fdisk, and mke2fs the
new drive. Mount it under /mnt exactly how you propose to set it up. Then
	cp -a /(everything but mnt) /mnt/

If you the other drive is the secondary drive (ie, not / or /usr or anything
important) in another machine, and you have ssh (or rsh) setup properly and
a LAN between the two, you can do something like:

	old.machine# ssh root at new.machine
	new.machine# mount /dev/new /mnt
	new.machine# exit
	old.machine# tar czf - / | ssh new.machine tar -C /mnt xzpvf -

You'll need to be careful that you've got ssh setup properly first though --
trying a few test tar | ssh untar's would be a good move.

> I have tried ftp'ing the system across with a system running on each drive 
> (2 separate machines) , and also tar-ing then and untaring, without 
> success.

The "p" option in the second tar above is important.

Basically it's just a matter of ensuring that you're copying /everything/
across (permissions and all), and you're not overwriting anything your
system needs to run. As long as you're /very/ careful about both those
steps, there aren't too many problems to be had, that I can think of.

HTH.

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.

``Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking
  for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.''
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