[H-GEN] Quick Question :)

[Tony Nugent]

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On Tue Feb 18 2003 at 13:14, "3 Blokes" wrote:

> On a side note, The server I was speaking about has a 20 Gig HDD in it which
> is needed elsewhere, i'm going to use Driveimage to image it to a 4Gig HDD I
> have sitting around, so here's my question, will linux 'freak' out when it
> boots up and finds all it's partitions have gotten alot smaller?

Essentially, no.  Not as far as re-creating/imaging the actual
filesystem.

The only real issue that you will have to worry about is the boot
sector -- it *must* point to the boot loader so that the system will
actually boot up as expected.

You don't even need to use a commercial product to do it (is
Driveimage commercial?  I don't know it).

If you put the 4Gb hard drive into the box and boot into the OS from
the current 20Gb drive, you can then partition/format/mount the 4Gb
one and simply "cp -ar" from the old location to the new to-be one.
Or use any number of similar methods to achive the same result...
mondo/mindi, tape backup/restore, rsync'ing over a network link,
whatever.

There is a tool called partimage that will allow you to do all this,
while managing the boot sector issue as well.

But if you create a floppy bootdisk, or use the rescue mode of the
original installer (or whatever), once the new disk is in place
then it is relatively easy to boot with this to re-create a new boot
sector on the hard drive.

One other issue to consider would be /etc/fstab -- it will need to
reflect the true nature of the mount points and locations of the
various partitions.

> Thankyou to all for you time,

Good luck.

BTW, I'm sure that there is a howto for doing things like this
somewhere to be found at http://www.tldp.org/

>          Joe Skilton

Cheers
Tony

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