clone system/application from small HD to big HD 1

[alan123]

how can I clone(transfer) all files as well as system(RH8) from a small hard drive to a big hard drive?
anyone has suggestions?

thanks

 

[fdalmoro]

Get tomsrtbt

http://www.toms.net/rb/

boot disk.

Power down the computer and put in the big hd.

Boot with tomsrtbt and run:

NOTE: Before running the following command make sure that the big hd is hdb. One way to do this is to run fdisk and check the size of the drive to make sure it's the one you want to overwrite.

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

This will create a clone of the hda drive onto the hdb drive. This will take some time depending on the drive size. When I did it a 10GB drive took about 30 minutes to copy over.

After the cloning process is complete, power down, remove the small drive and put the big drive in the same location and settings (ie slave or master) that the small drive was.

Hope this helps

 

[alan123]

thanks, can I clone the scsi small HD to ide big HD?
just run: dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sdb
Do I need to partition the bid hd before run "dd"?

 

[alan123]

question:
after "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb", reboot with new big HD, if I use "df" to check disk space, I still see the small HD's space, where is the rest space gone?

 

[Morsing]

Of course. The method you used makes an exact copy of the small disk which means you will end up with the exact same (small) filesystems.

A much better idea would be to implement LVM, put the new disk in a VG and migrate the filesystems over there.

It's a bit of work but then you'd have LVM.

Cheers

Henrik Morsing
Certified AIX 4.3 Systems Administration
& p690 Technical Support

 

[fdalmoro]

You don't have to partition your big harddrive before dd and I don't know about LVM but.. to use the space you can fdisk and partition your unused space. Create a mount point to it anywhere that you need the space.

Just go to the cli, fdisk and create the partition.

Run mkfs on the new partition to format it.

Create a directory like /storage or something like that and mount the new partition to it. You can then edit the /etc/fstab to mount it on boot.

If you want some other way to configure it, write it up and we'll see what we can do. Please be specific and paste the output from anything you do like fdisk or df or your /etc/fstab.