[CentOS] Replacing a hard drive
John Summerfield
debian at herakles.homelinux.org
Wed Mar 14 21:36:04 UTC 2007
Bowie Bailey wrote:
> I have a CentOS 4.4 system where all of the main filesystems are on a
> single hard drive. This drive is starting to give some errors, so I got
> a new (larger) drive to replace it with. What is the easiest way to
> copy my filesystems over to the new drive?
>
> I considered using dd, but I lose the extra capacity of the new drive
> that way.
Not necessarily.
>
> I tried using SystemImager, but it is giving me some errors.
>
> I think the easiest way may be to boot from the LiveCD, recreate the
> partitions, copy the info with rsync and then fix the boot partition and
> grub. Any tips or pointers to a good how-to?
I don't see a particular advantage to rsync for a once-off copy. My
perennial favourite is
tar clC / ... | tar xpC ....
Insert ssh if you need to copy system to system. insert buffer into the
chain if you have it. Use compression if you're copying over a slow network.
btw I recently did this, and I discovered the failing drive didn't work
at all in a USB enclosure.
I used the tar trick, it's more robust than dd when some stuff can't be
read.
You might want to enclose the commands:
(tar ... | tar ...) 2>&1 | tee /tmp/reportfile
because if there are lots of errors, you probably want to know there are
lots of errors and be able to inspect them later.
We lost stuff - stuff like the squid cache, some mirrored Linux - stuff
that was fairly easy to ignore/recreate.
>
> --
> Bowie
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>
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
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