On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 23:43 -0500, Bob S wrote:
On Monday 06 February 2006 08:23, Ken Schneider wrote:
On Sun, 2006-02-05 at 23:59 -0500, Bob S wrote:
Hello SuSE people .....................<snip some>.................................. 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
Hello Ken, thanks for replying. For my understanding, Please excuse my ignorance. These are not "real" directories, right ? They are in ram disk or something and go away when you close down the system?
They are real directories created on the ram disk and yes they will disappear after a reboot.
3. mount old root and new root mount /dev/hda2 /old mount /dev/hdb2 /new
OK, won't need a password for that right?
No, just type root as the user name at the login prompt.
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.
OK, how do I stop and restart rsync, and will it pick up where it left off?, and how would I look at what is there?
ctrl-c will stop the process. Look at what is there they same way you look at any files in a file system. And yes it will pick up where it left off.
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.
Re: the /swap partition which on the old disk is hda3, should I create it when I format the new hard drive?,
Well you have to create the partitions first anyway so yes.
before I rsync everything over to the drive? I stated in my message that I was going to format the new drive only, no partitions, rsync doesn't create a real partition right?
If you are going to store data on a filesystem on a disk you need to create as least one partition which is actually what is formatted. Why not make it two and have a swap partition as well.
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.
Yes it helps. Sounds a lot less complicated.
-- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998