On 03/11/09 15:45, Leo wrote: > Keith Edmunds wrote: >> On Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:56:58 +0000, li...@fractal.me.uk said: >> >>> If I were to create four partitions on the new disk (not >>> necessarily the same sizes as the old ones), copy the data >>> across from the old disks, and tell the BIOS to boot from the new >>> /boot partition, would Ubuntu be happy? >> >> You'd need to write the boot sector too, probably using Grub, but >> otherwise yes, it should be happy. >> > > Well I believe I've sorted grub. However I now realise that in order > to copy / I need something to cope with links (I need them kept the > same), and mounts (specifically: /home/ and /boot/ are different > disks so I don't want them copied, but I don't know if e.g. /dev/ > must copied?)
/dev on a modern Linux system is usually managed by udev and should not need copying. To check this: # grep /dev /etc/fstab > Google suggests a few different ways of doing it (copy, rsync,...) > and I was wondering which is best? > > Leo For the others I would probably use rsync as it will preserve hard and soft links as well as permissions if needed (mind you, cp -a should do this as well) rsync has about a million commandline options, however, leading to commands like this: rsync -avxPHAX /source/mount/ /dst/mount/ Which should preserve hard and soft links, permissions, acls, xattrs, ownership etc and not cross filesystem boundaries and show you how far it's got. The trailing / on the paths is very important. rsync copies everything after the last / in each path. but, by 'keep them the same', did you mean that you're going to reuse the existing /home and /boot/ ? Or just that you want to ensure they're separate FSs again? in that case just mount the new disks under /dst/mount/home and /dst/mount/boot and rsync the entire / into /dst/mount Regards, Stuart -- Stuart Sears RHCA etc. "It's today!" said Piglet. "My favourite day," said Pooh. -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
