[H-GEN] Hardware Upgrade

[Tony Nugent]

[ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
[ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]

On Mon Jan 06 2003 at 08:14, Jason Rees wrote:

> I have a Debian woody machine, Pentium 200 and a 2GB hard drive that is
> currently working well but it is a little slow and quickly running out of
> disk space.  I have just aquired a Celeron 1.7GHz machine with a 40Gb drive
> and I want to transfer everything on to this machine.  Is it possible to
> somehow copy all my files and configs to this new machine without actually
> installing Debian again?  I originally installed slink on the old machine
> from CD and have just been upgrading over time.  I don't really want to go
> through the process of installing from CD and reconfiguring everything
> again.  Any tips would be great!

Fairly easy to do.

- boot your new box into some sort of cdrom or floppy-based linux
  disk (rescue or whatever)
- partition and format the hard drive as you want
- mount them onto a mount point (eg mount the drives root partition
  onto /mnt then your /boot partition onto /mnt/boot, /home onto
  /mnt/home and so on)
- then (somehow, eg, network) copy the entire contents of your old
  setup into /mnt.
  
You will need to edit /mnt/etc/inittab to not boot into X, and
/mnt/etc/fstab to reflect your new setup.

Finally you need to get lilo or grub installed into the /dev/hda (or
whatever) boot sector so that it will reboot.  The best way to do
this is "chroot /mnt /bin/bash --login", then run either lilo or
grub-install (after editing their configuration files.

Now finally reboot, and if all went well you should have a running
system.  Now modify /etc/X11/XF86Config(-4), sound modules and so
to work with your new hardware.

> Thanks,
> 
> Jason

Hope this helps.  There's a lot of detail that I've glossed over,
but the basic procedure has worked for me on many occasions.  There
would be several ways to modify any of this (eg, if you can get nfs
working with the linux boot image, a simple "cp -ar" will also do
the trick to mirror your original installation).

Alternatively, you might be able to use tools like a boot image that
will run parted, which can mirror drives very nicely (which would be
especially useful if the boot image will work over a network).

Good luck.

Cheers
Tony

--
* This is list (humbug) general handled by majordomo at lists.humbug.org.au .
* Postings to this list are only accepted from subscribed addresses of
* lists 'general' or 'general-post'.  See http://www.humbug.org.au/