Moving old gentoo install to new hard drive [solved]

[elensia]

Hello.

I am new here and with gentoo and this will be my first post.
I had some help installing gentoo on my system and everything was ok except a minor detail.

It was installed in my first physical IDE hard drive on the second partition while windows is on the first partition.

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# fdisk  -l

Disk /dev/hda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2ad92ad8

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1       10199    81920000    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2           10200       18867    69625710   83  Linux
/dev/hda3           18868       19457     4739175   82  Linux swap / Solaris

What i need now is to move the whole gentoo install to my second physical hard drive:

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# fdisk  -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xd982d982

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1       29903   240195816   83  Linux
/dev/sda2           29904       30401     4000185   82  Linux swap / Solaris

This is a sata hard drive but i have made the partitions with the same filesystem type, (reiserfs).

If i am not mistaken i have to use dd to copy the install over the new hard drive but i have never done this.

What steps do i need to take to copy it properly and have it working flawlessly?

[NeddySeagoon]

elensia,

Welcome to Gentoo.

You can indeed use dd to copy things but there are a number of problems with dd.
dd does a low level disk block by disk block copy, taking no account of the content. This means it copies your entire filesystem as is, including the empty space and the structure of the filesystem. As first sight - this appears to be exactly what you need.

However to copy is an *identical* copy of the input - that means that if your new partition is bigger than your old one, the spare space will vanish in the copy.
Its physically still there but you can't use it, so I suggest you don't use dd.

If you attempt to copy a live system, you will have problems copying /dev /sys and /proc, which are not real filesystems at all.
Boot with a liveCD mount your Gentoo install, then use the cp -a command.
Read

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man cp

This will copy the files on your install to their new home, preserving their permissions and ownership. It will also safely copy your /dev /sys and /proc, which will be almost empty as your install is not running.

You will need to finish off the copy by adjusting /etc/fstab to point to Gentoos new home and you will need to install grub to the MBR if you want to be able to boot from the SATA drive. This is because the bootloader is installed outside of any filesystem, so cannot be copied using the cp command.
dd can copy it but you don't want an exact copy.

Other readers will suggest rsync or even tar. They all work

[Raistlin Majere]

i would recommend rsync ( or something like it) over using cp -a because if it gets interrupted , you would have to start all over with cp ( i could be wrong) where as something like rsync won't make you recopy the same files if something interrupts it and rsync will cleanup anything it doesn't finish copying if it's interrupted
I recommend using SystemRescueCD ( it comes with rsync) to do this.

Of course check the rsync man page but you want something like

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rsync -av /mnt/point/of/src/ /mnt/point/of dest/

[Mike Hunt]

... and use the --exclude option something like this:

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rsync -av --exclude /proc --exclude /tmp --exclude /sys / <target>

and re-create those excluded directories on the target before booting:

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mkdir <target>/tmp <target>/sys <target>/proc
chmod 1777 <target>/tmp

[d2_racing]

You can even use SystemrescueCD and use the Stage 5 backup method.

[Mike Hunt]

Stage 5

Fixed that for you.

[d2_racing]

Stage 5 using SystemRescueCD : http://www.gentoo-quebec.org/wiki/index ... emRescueCD

[cach0rr0]

However to copy is an *identical* copy of the input - that means that if your new partition is bigger than your old one, the spare space will vanish in the copy.
Its physically still there but you can't use it, so I suggest you don't use dd.

Could you not just do an fdisk+edit+write, then grow the file system(s) as needed?

I will concede this isn't the swiftest process in the world, but I've used this to clone machines in the past.

[d2_racing]

Indeed, DD copy the exact size of the partition, so that's why it's better to use tar when you want to put your Gentoo box inside a new HDD or a new computer

[cach0rr0]

Indeed, DD copy the exact size of the partition, so that's why it's better to use tar when you want to put your Gentoo box inside a new HDD or a new computer

I guess the main reason I opted for dd, is that I was doing all of this over the network, using dd piped to netcat.

Basically, had netcat listening on destination host with of=/dev/sda, and on the source host if=/dev/sda piped to nc x.x.x.x:zz (where x.x.x.x:zz is remote host IP and port)

Took ~3 hours to clone a 320GB drive, and all I had to do when I was done was change the IP and hostname.

[NeddySeagoon]

cach0rr0,

Once upon a time, growing a filesystem was not supported, but yes, you could partition the new drive, dd the partition and providing you are using a filesystem that supports growing, grow the filesystem to fill the partition.

cp, rsync, tar are all faster, as you don't copy empty space and the copy gets rid of any file fragmentation you might have too. dd carefully preserves this.

[d2_racing]

Indeed, that's why I like tar .

[richard.scott]

What about using a clonezilla cd to do the copy?

[cwr]

I _think_ Clonezilla is basically a front end to dd; I haven't looked at it in
a while, but when I did it was pretty rough. On the whole, tar seems
simpler and more effective.

Will

[richard.scott]

Clonezilla only uses dd when the other tools it has don't work.
IMHO its a hassle free way to move from one drive to another.

You don't need any experience at moving data, you just need to select the correct drives as source and target and then come back in an hour or two.

Rich

[Old_dude]

Why not just use the stage4 script to build archive the system, extract it to the new location? It is easy, I just did so when upgrading my server to a new hard drive. HTH

[keenblade]

Clonezilla only uses dd when the other tools it has don't work.
IMHO its a hassle free way to move from one drive to another.

You don't need any experience at moving data, you just need to select the correct drives as source and target and then come back in an hour or two.

Rich

I agree. And clonezilla is incredibly fast, easy and one of the best. Or use stage5 which is also very nice.

[wjb]

I'll say Clonezilla too.

I recently moved gentoo from dying 200Gb to a new 500Gb disk. The step by step guides made it pretty painless.

[d2_racing]

I _think_ Clonezilla is basically a front end to dd; Will

I would like to know that too, because if it's really a DD front end, then sometimes I don't want to use the DD method if for example, I change my HDD and I double my partition size.

[keenblade]

I _think_ Clonezilla is basically a front end to dd; Will

I would like to know that too, because if it's really a DD front end, then sometimes I don't want to use the DD method if for example, I change my HDD and I double my partition size.

No it is not a front end to dd. Only for unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd. It is a live cd that can use partclone, partimage, ntfsclone, and dd to clone partition. It supports both grub1 and 2. It is very advanced, lots of possibility. It can massively clone. It can be booted from cd/dvd or usb.

[d2_racing]

I gonna try this one next week for sure

[Element Dave]

I would like to know that too, because if it's really a DD front end, then sometimes I don't want to use the DD method if for example, I change my HDD and I double my partition size.

No it is not a front end to dd. Only for unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd. It is a live cd that can use partclone, partimage, ntfsclone, and dd to clone partition. It supports both grub1 and 2. It is very advanced, lots of possibility. It can massively clone. It can be booted from cd/dvd or usb.

I've used ntfsclone many times over the past couple of years and it works very well. The images are saved fast and efficiently (i.e., it doesn't store unused clusters), and more important, the restore process has never failed. I've used it to move partitions as well as restore them to the original location. In my experience, it works better than the commercial tools I've used, probably because of the environment from which it's run. The version of NTFS that was imaged was that which is used by XP (3.1? -- offhand guess).

For backup of Gentoo/Linux, I just use a custom Perl script that is nothing more than a front-end to tar to maintain multiple sets of incremental backups.

One "trick" for using tar to backup a complete live system: *bind* your root filesystem to a temporary mount point and back _that_ up. E.g.,

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mkdir /mnt/dump
mount --bind / /mnt/dump
tar -c[options] -C /mnt/dump ./
umount /mnt/dump
rmdir /mnt/dump

That will back up everything under / including static files under e.g., /dev, without descending into submounts. I.e., /mnt/dump (in the example above) represents your "real" root filesystem without any other filesystems mounted on it.

[gerard27]

I have moved my Gentoo partitions several times.
I always use rescuecd.
I simply use

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mount /dev/<original> /mnt/gentoo
mount /dev/<new-partion> /mnt/backup
cp -a /mnt/gentoo/* /mnt/backup

I use it also to make back-ups.
Never any problems.
It's probably not the most sophisticated way,but it works and is simple.
Gerard.

[d2_racing]

As anyone knows, I use a tarball backup, because I use it to backup my box or migrate to a newer one

[Yamakuzure]

Please take a look at "rdup" in the sunrise overlay. It allows to do everything with a single command. Incrementally. With and without tar. With and without encryption.


@gerard82: What about the nodes in dev? sys? proc? Do you get errors from cp? (I ask, because I had alot of problems with that exact method when copying the root partition, and that was the reason why I ended with "rdup")

Almost forgot: rdup project page