I remember back in '99 when Brendon Davidson wrote:
> I installed linux on another hard drive yesterday and now I'm trying
> to make a copy of the boot disk... problem is, when i try to copy the
> disk to my hard drive, it gets to the /mnt/floppy/dev directory and
> then actually copies /dev/hdb1 to the hard drive. Needless to say,
> this is not what I want. It seems that on the disk they are block
> special files. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks.
Here's my best-effort partition copying command:
Assumes that
1) you are booted to the old drive, and all your files are in the /
partition (that is, there are no other partitions used by linux
that you want to copy like a distinct /usr or /var/spool)
2) your new drive is mounted under /mnt/new
find / -xdev -depth | cpio -p -C 1048576 -d /mnt/new
The find generates a list of all files under / on the same
mount point (-xdev). The -depth tells find to do a depth-first
search (hard to explain without using a big example, but
cpio needs it).
The cpio command does the actual copying. -p is pass-through
mode (we're not creating or extracting from a cpio archive file,
just using it to copy things). -C 1048576 tells cpio to read
and write in 1MB blocks. -d tells cpio to create directories if
it needs to. /mnt/new is the target.
If you did have a seperate /usr partition or something you could do
this:
find /usr -xdev -depth | cpio -p -C 1048576 -d /mnt/new/usr
I'll leave it as an excercise to the reader to conjure up a
script that parses the output of mount and does this all
automatically. ;)
WARNING: I've done this before, but I'm typing all this in
from memory and man pages.. I don't think there's any way to
really screw things up, but just watch out.. You might want
to add a -v to the cpio command to get it to print out what
it's doing.
Matt
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