Old PC -> New PC ?

Gregoire · Apprentice Joined: 15 Apr 2006 Posts: 292

Hello,

I have ordered new components for a new PC (this one is now 5 years old and still more or less good but really too noisy and a little bit slow even with my core 2 duo @2.4 Ghz).
The new system will be Ivy Bridge based and with a 4 TB hard disc (no I don't like SSD and as I don't powerdown my computer and have my applications open it won't run faster with one) replacing my "raid" of 4 400Gb hard discs (with lvm2).

For me the "best" solution could be to prepare the new system on the old one.

Would there be a major problem to plug the new disc on the old motherboard and partition it here (GPT, I thought of 100Gb for / ext4, small swap partition and the rest for /data with xfs) then do a
mount /dev/sde1 /mnt/newHD
rsync -avPx / /mnt/newHD
mount /dev/sde3 /mnt/newHD/data
do some magick (?) for the needed entries in dev
rsync -avPx /data /mnt/newHD/data
then install grub on the newHD.

Change the newHD to the new system, remove the nvidia use flags, add the needed (?) for HD4000 and do the emerge upgrade (some things won't work out of the box but I use gentoo for quiet long so it's certainly fixable).

What do you htink ?

Veldrin · Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2012 10:12 pm Post subject:

sounds reasonable. 100GB for the entire system is ok. what are you doing about you home? same partition? or is it on data? (just curious)

the cloning steps could have one (possibly fatal) problem: recursion. (or would that only happen in subsequent runs?)
to be on the safe side, I would add one step, which would also cover your /dev problem.

platojones · Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2012 10:24 pm Post subject:

I made the big upgrade a few weeks ago. I went from a 4 year old Core2 based Q9550 to the new X78 platform and a Sandy Bridge E. Since I got a new drive, I just copied the last backup onto the new disk and that was it...the kernel and rootfs just worked.

One big difference with the newest MBs though...they've begun to transition from traditional BIOS to UEFI and that is a whole new world (and a whole new GRUB). So, depending on the MB you get, better start studying up on UEFI/GPT/GRUB2.

Gregoire · Apprentice Joined: 15 Apr 2006 Posts: 292

I thought of putting home into the system (know I use 9Gb for home which is really enough).

Thanks for the extra step and I wasn't sure if I had to go to GRUB2 but it seems so (will be UEFI based board).

Gregoire · Apprentice Joined: 15 Apr 2006 Posts: 292

platojones · Posted: Wed May 02, 2012 12:19 am Post subject:

Congrats on the new build...

First, I cheated a little bit...I dual boot windows 7 on this machine and windows created the small (100 mb) vfat EFI partition for me. Nevertheless, that is correct...gdisk to create a small 100 mb vfat GPT partion. I also created a 10 GB ext2 boot partition to store my kernels which I mount the smaller 100 mb EFI partition on. Then, just create all of your other GPT partitions sized to you requirements.

I really don't know if there are any size restriction on the vfat EFI partition, but 100 mb seems fine...the EFI files don't take very much space, even for a dual boot system. The /boot partition can be any size you want (depending on how many kernel images you want to keep around). 10GB was about right for my tastes...and that's still a lot of room for kernels and the there is no 'grub' directory anymore.

keet · Guru Joined: 09 Sep 2008 Posts: 568

I used to have a separate boot partition for Gentoo, but not anymore. Maybe some will consider it a bad idea, but I just point GRUB to /usr/src/linux/arch/x86/boot/bzImage. GRUB is installed on my EFI partition, and it works very nicely. I found boot times to be a few seconds faster with EFI and GPT than than were with BIOS and MBR.

Gregoire · Apprentice Joined: 15 Apr 2006 Posts: 292

I finally got it with booting from grub2 in UEFI from ubuntu 12.04 cd but with my complete system : so nice to finally have a 2560x1600 console at boot !!!

I have gone for one 250Mb /boot partition in vfat and one other 150Gb for the system (ext4) and the rest for data in xfs.

It took me some time to understand grub2/UEFI and also how to use intel HD4000 (I have still to achieve to compil a vaapi's mplayer).

Thanks for all !!!

katafitos · n00b Joined: 22 Nov 2006 Posts: 56 Location: Greece

I have to upgrade from Athlon XP (nvidia2) to Ivy Bridge 3770 (H77) which I believe I should change nearly the whole Kernel.

Any insights for the Kernel options?

Gregoire · Apprentice Joined: 15 Apr 2006 Posts: 292

It took me some time to understand the option for framebuffer and X11, I put my in case that help anyone config (for 3.4.0) in case that help anyone.

I didn't enable hyperthreading and I see 8 cores so I think it's right but I am not certain.