On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 10:01 AM, Grant <emailgr...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm about to switch from one SATA hard drive to another and I'm > planning on going through the normal installation process except for > copying over the data on each partition of my old drive to the > corresponding partition on my new drive. Is there anything to watch > out for? Pitfalls to avoid, etc?
I don't think so... it depends on what drive it is and how it is partitioned... if there's just one partition then it should be as simple as formatting the new copy and "cp -a /olddrive /newdrive" If it's your boot drive and has boot/root/home/and so on partitions then you'll need to pay attention to the partition numbers as they very well may be different when you partition the new disk. Be sure to edit the grub config & fstab to make sure it's all pointing to the right place. An alternative in that case would be to use dd to clone the old drive onto the new one, then use something like parted (gparted/qtparted for GUI) to resize the partitions to fit the new disk, assuming the filesystems in use allow for such a thing. The disadvantage to this is you are closing fragmentation and everything else, and if the new drive is a lot bigger than the old, you may not have enough inodes in your fileystem. Whenever I do that, I boot from a live CD and copy the drives as above, then plug the new drive into its official cable, boot from live CD again and make sure the partition numbers are right, install grub (if boot drive), reboot and everything is done. If anything went horribly wrong, you've always got the original drive that you can go back to and try again. Good luck :) Paul
