From: David Fairey Sent: 29 January 2006 11:21
Hi guys,
I'm looking to transfer one of my linux boxes from it's 3Gb drive to a bigger drive (40Gb).
What's the easiest method to transfer a partition including the boot manager to another drive?
when I upgraded from a 20Gb HD to an 80Gb HD recently I used the free edition of HDClone http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html#free. (as I had a dual boot WinXP / Ubuntu setup it got round all the irritating XP idiosyncrasies).
How can the root partition be resize afterwards? Or would it make sense to start using a separate /var, /usr partitions?
I used the SystemRescueCD http://www.sysresccd.org/ and the QTParted and partimage utilise it offers to shuffle my Linux partitions around (but be careful about the partition orders and names I inadvertently moved my root partition from /dev/hda5 to /dev/hda7 and Ubuntu got really snotty about it :-) ).
Personally I always have separate partitions for /usr, /var, /home, /tmp, /home/[my home dir] and /[my mail dir] because;
a) I can keep better track of how and where the space is being used b) it makes backing up easier, I just back up the entire partition to a CD-RW
Actually when I did the HD upgrade I also put in a DVD writer, so I now back up the partitions to a DVD+RW, but the principle's the same except I now have a 5Gb max partition size (which I can easily get on a single DVD) rather than 2Gb (which would sometimes go on to 2 CDs even with compression). I use partimage to do this now, but I used to use tar.
Regards,
Keith ____________ The little things in life are as interesting as the big ones. - Henry David Thoreau