[Solved] cloning multi-partitioned system to larger HDD

[angry_arctic_avian]

I am trying to clone my almost entire Gentoo install onto a larger hard drive. I followed a partitioning scheme similar to what was suggested by the installation guide from the website. My installation is currently is divded onto two 40GB hard drives, with /home occupying the slave drive. I wish to clone only the first hard drive onto a 160GB drive. This is how /dev/sda is partitioned:

[Quincy]

If the system is fully only Linux it is quite easy:

- Boot from a live CD (Important! It does not work when the system itself is running)
- Partition the target drive as you like
- Create file systems on the new drive
-,Mount old and new partitions and copy data using "cp -a"
- Finally get your boot manager running as you did when installing from within a chroot

I think this will circumvent all your problems/questions because it is fully flexible.

[robdd]

Hi aaavian,

The tool I would use is dump/restore - it's originally an old Unix tool to dump and restore to tape because that was the way things were backed up when I was a lad. But it's perfect for copying Linux partitions because it knows about dev and proc and won't try to copy them as regular files.

So here's how I would do it:

1) Emerge dump (latest version I'm using is app-arch/dump-0.4.44-r1)- that also loads restore.

2) Use fdisk to create the partitions on the new 160Gb drive. It may cause problems if you've already dd'd the partition table from a different size disc, so clear the first few dozen sectors by dd'ing from /dev/zero (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M, then kill it with Ctrl-C after a short delay) and write a new one with fdisk. Linux doesn't care if partitions are primary or extended, so just decide what layout you want.

3) You can do the copies while you're current system is running, but best to go to single-user mode where almost nothing else is running (as root type "shutdown now", and wait until it says you're in single user mode).

4) Prepare each partition on the new disc by doing a mkfs.ext3 (or ext2 or ext4 - I don't think restore supports other filesystem types, but good old ext3 works for me every time). Then mount each new partition on your current system at a suitable mount point, e.g. /mnt/new_part (you'll have to make a directory in /mnt with the name you want to use, or use an existing sub-directory in /mnt). Probably better to do one partition at a time, and keep notes of where you are. Less chance os screwing up that way. And you should certainly make sure you have backups of all your valuable data.

5) Copy across each partition. You can either dump to a file on a backup disc first (which is good if you want to keep backups anyway), or you can copy directly by piping the output of dump straight into restore.

Let's say you want to copy from /dev/sda1 mounted on / to /dev/sdc1 mounted on /mnt/new_part - you type

[angry_arctic_avian]

Thanks robdd and Quincy for the replies. Sorry it took so long to write back, due to work, illness, and the 136 package update I had put off due to starting this hard drive move.

I ended doing pretty much what Quincy suggested, although I used rsync instead of cp to make the copy. I did the partition table in a similar layout like the source hard drive, and copied the /boot, / and the logical partions to their correlating partition on the target drive. So far, I haven't encountered any problems after booting into the new disk. Thanks again for taking the time to reply.

[Quincy]

Yes rsync was also an option, I'm using that pretty much for backups.
Good that it worked so well