Rob,
You can do this many ways... Fortunatly you have Linux! You can down the
system, add the new disk, boot the system, format the new drive (might be a
good time to try the reiser file system...), now... your ready to put the
existing system on the new drive. you can do this several ways and probably
(hopefully ) someone will have an even more fun way..
If you have a cd-bootable system, you could boot a live filesystem (like
demolinux, Slack live filesystem cd, or even that ever-handy linux care cd),
mount your drives (/diskold /disknew) and then do a cp -rp /diskold
/disknew, then all you have to do is wait for the files to copy, and rdev the
new /disknew drive.
here are some harder ways to do it, depending on your situation...
To dupe the files from one drive, you can (boot to console mode first...)
you can use the cp command to copy the files from one disk to another , but
you need to mount the disk to copy them, and you dont want to copy that dir
over to itself (or the /proc dir). So... this is sticky... if you do a ls >
ls.txt, you will have a file with all the directorys, to which you could edit
and make a script that will cp -rp all the dirs you want, but not the ones
you dont. Note: cp -rp (recursive, save file ownership/permission).
But thats really ugly.
There are utilites for this i belive... What I usually do is tar, but this
requires you have over 1/2 of the drive free to fit the tar file (then you
gzip it and copy/transfer it to the new drive, burn to cd, ...).
You could also just make a big ISO of your disk, so... its possible that you
could make a system that boots to floppy, and uses a isofs for the system...
then you could make your iso of the existing system, copy it to the new
drive, boot the system using the new drive and ISO, with the system running
on the iso image on the new drive, mount the old disk, and copy the files
directly from old drive to new drive, then just reboot w/o the floppy
Hey... how about doing an NFS mount, and copy the files across a network...
gosh there really is no end to the ways this can be difficult...
Jamie
On Saturday 12 May 2001 08:29 pm, you wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On my workstation at work, I have a hard drive that I am slowly
> filling up. I have at my disposal another hard drive about twice its
> size.
>
> My question is if I can install the 2nd drive as the new primary drive
> and do an installation. While I'm in the process of getting all the
> pieces required for me to work, can I still use the old drive? And
> boot into the new one if I have time work tweak it, and the old one if
> I need to get work done?
>
> It seems pretty reasonable, but I wanted to make sure before I
> attempted it.
>
> Thanks,
> Rob
