On Sun, 2006-02-05 at 23:59 -0500, Bob S wrote:
Hello SuSE people,
I know this has been discussed a thousand times already, and I have reviewed 60+ archived email messages, and looked at the man page a couple of times about this subject/procedure. I am still unsure.
Here is my situation. Added a brand new 40 gig hard drive to the system. Plan to only format it to ext3 using Yast. Now I want to copy my entire SuSE 9.2 which is all on one partition with the exception of /swap, is presently on hda2, over to the new drive and let it reside there as an operating OS.
The procedure would be to open a console as root, and then issue an rsync ( + unknown options) / /dev/hdb command, and if this is correct, which I really don't think it is, and then after copying cd into /etc/fstab and edit the / partition and the /swap partition. Then cd into /boot/grub/Menu1st and edit that also to make it bootable.
Then what about /proc ? Does that get copied over? and should it be?
I am only a basic CLI guy.
If anyone has any better solutions I would like to hear them.
A better procedure would be to: 1. boot the a rescue system using either the install CD or DVD 2. create two mount points mkdir /old mkdir /new 3. mount old root and new root mount /dev/hda2 /old mount /dev/hdb2 /new 4. copy the data from the old disk to the new disk rsync -varpltz /old/ /new/ should do the trick. You always want to copy your system in quite mode (not running) which is what booting to the rescue CD/DVD does. This also takes care of the /proc problem as it should not be copied, only the directory created. /proc is dynamic and should be empty on a system that is not running. You can check this by looking at /old/proc when booted in rescue mode, the only thing on my laptop is proc/bus/usb which is empty. Start up rsync let it copy a few files and stop it and check /new that files/dirs are being created as you expect them to be. If they are then vi /new/etc/fstab and make any necessary changes. The last thing needed is to modify grub on the bootable first disk to add the new disk as a boot option. Also when creating partitions on the new disk create a swap partition just in case the old disk gets completely trashed. Hope this helps. If you have problems let us know what you were doing when the problem occurred, and be very precise with all of the steps/syntax used. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998