[H-GEN] Hardware Upgrade

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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Tony Nugent <tony at linuxworks.com.au> writes:

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

I would heartily recommend using single user mode for this operation
instead of booting all the way into multiuser mode.  Network transfers
and so on are still completely possible if you know what you're doing,
and it has the added benefit of ensuring data will (probably) not
change while you are trying to copy it.  This guarantee is more
difficult to satisfy when the system is in multi-user mode.

> 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).

I would also use dump/restore, or rsync, or (in a pinch) even tar.  It
can be very fiddly to make sure in advance that cp is doing the right
thing, whereas the operation is fairly trivial with tools specially
built for this situation.

> 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).

This is also a good suggestion.

jason
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