RE: [ALUG] Transferring Linux to another hard drive
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
On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 13:04 +0000, Keith Watson wrote:
Personally I always have separate partitions for /usr, /var, /home, /tmp, /home/[my home dir] and /[my mail dir] because;
I tend to avoid this on my own machines. I usually run a separate /home but that's about it. On some servers where I expect /var to be busy I have put this on it's own partition but that was mainly before journaling filesystems were common. Before when I have seen such granular partition schemes someone has often managed to underestimate at least one of the partition sizes and then I think the inconvenience of sorting it out outweighs the benefits. Would love to hear other thoughts or opinions on this.
On 30-Jan-06 Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 13:04 +0000, Keith Watson wrote:
Personally I always have separate partitions for /usr, /var, /home, /tmp, /home/[my home dir] and /[my mail dir] because;
I tend to avoid this on my own machines.
I usually run a separate /home but that's about it.
On some servers where I expect /var to be busy I have put this on it's own partition but that was mainly before journaling filesystems were common.
Before when I have seen such granular partition schemes someone has often managed to underestimate at least one of the partition sizes and then I think the inconvenience of sorting it out outweighs the benefits.
Would love to hear other thoughts or opinions on this.
On balance, I'm inclined to agree with you, Wayne. These days there's not usually a problem with having very large paritions. The main reason I still hesitate is that if you change or update your Linux distro, it's more secure (for the sake of keeping your old stuff intact which includes all "data" files you created) to have at least /home on a separate partition, and I like to have another one at least which I call /usr/local/depot containing all sorts of stuff I want to keep in hand. Cheers, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 30-Jan-06 Time: 21:18:27 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
On Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 09:10:39PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 13:04 +0000, Keith Watson wrote:
Personally I always have separate partitions for /usr, /var, /home, /tmp, /home/[my home dir] and /[my mail dir] because;
Before when I have seen such granular partition schemes someone has often managed to underestimate at least one of the partition sizes and then I think the inconvenience of sorting it out outweighs the benefits.
Would love to hear other thoughts or opinions on this.
Use LVM, then you can make your partitions bigger to suit at a later date (and add new disks and make existing partitions bigger as and when you need it). Of course, I'm not actually using lvm at the moment as all my machines have ancient installs on them, when they get reinstalled they will all be using lvm. Thanks Adam -- jabberid = quinophex@jabber.earth.li AFFS || http://www.affs.org.uk/ || Not a filesystem
On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 21:30 +0000, Adam Bower wrote:
Use LVM, then you can make your partitions bigger to suit at a later date (and add new disks and make existing partitions bigger as and when you need it). Of course, I'm not actually using lvm at the moment as all my machines have ancient installs on them, when they get reinstalled they will all be using lvm.
Yes I was going to mention that, I use LVM on anything where there is more than a small chance that my storage will need to grow between rebuilds. One example here is my media server which holds my CD collection (and pretty soon my DVD collection) There is a tiny CPU overhead, but to be honest it is only noticeable on slow or heavily loaded machines. However you are increasing the odds of filesystem loss due to disk failure. Which is why really LVM should be used on top of a fault tolerant disk system. Actually if I was building my media server again I would look more closely at http://evms.sourceforge.net/ It is a bit cleverer than LVM but does essentially the same thing.
Adam Bower <adam@thebowery.co.uk>
Use LVM, then you can make your partitions bigger to suit [...]
In my experience, there are a couple of gotchas when combining different LVM versions and filesystems. lvm 1.0 and ext2 works, but ext3 had some interesting side-effects (ext3 seemed to need unmounting totally to snapshot reliably). lvm 1.0 and reiserfs lost data, but I'm inclined to blame reiser for that even though I couldn't prove or debug it. What works well for users of LVM or similar systems? -- MJ Ray - personal email, see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Work: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ irc.oftc.net/slef Jabber/SIP ask
On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 11:33 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
What works well for users of LVM or similar systems?
ext2 over lvm2 I can't remember the specific reason for using ext2...I think at some point it was ext3 but I couldn't grow it.
Keith Watson <keith.watson@kewill.com> wrote:
From: David Fairey Sent: 29 January 2006 11:21 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).
In the end I used the HantsLUG suggestion of "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdd" which copied 3Gb to the 40Gb including the boot sector which saved having to mess around running grub/lilo. Created a larger swap partition and a larger /var partition (box runs mainly nagios and mysql databases).
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 :-) ).
When resizing the root partition (hda1) does lilo need to be re-run? Reading the docs and warnings it seems it does but I'm guessing as long it's not "moved" lilo will still work? Cheers David
On 1/31/06, David Fairey <me@davidfairey.org.uk> wrote:
When resizing the root partition (hda1) does lilo need to be re-run? Reading the docs and warnings it seems it does but I'm guessing as long it's not "moved" lilo will still work?
You need to re-run lilo if vmlinuz (or which ever image lilo loads first) has moved. You'll soon find out if you need to re-run it if the PC fails to reboot! Tim.
On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 23:27 +0000, David Fairey wrote:
When resizing the root partition (hda1) does lilo need to be re-run? Reading the docs and warnings it seems it does but I'm guessing as long it's not "moved" lilo will still work?
You should be ok as long as you don't change the start point of the partition, if you grow the partition towards the "end" of the disk nothing should change as far as lilo is concerned.
participants (7)
-
Adam Bower -
David Fairey -
Keith Watson -
MJ Ray -
Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk -
Tim Green -
Wayne Stallwood