At Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:39:07 -0400 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 09:03:13AM -0400, Robert Heller wrote:
At Tue, 14 Sep 2010 13:12:46 +0100 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
Is there a document with instructions for this? I've had smartd warnings that a hard disk in my server is sick, so I am installing a new drive (in addition to the old).
Here is an article I wrote about doing this:
http://www.deepsoft.com/2009/01/how-to-transfer-a-linux-system-from-one-disk...
As someone who came from FreeBSD, dump restore was always considered best there. Hoewver, I've heard (though not deeply investigated), that due to various things in the Linux kernel, dump restore isn't the best approach for Linux, and there will be metadata loss. DISCLAIMER--this isn't something I've really looked into, however last time I was going to do it, I saw enoughw warnings about it to make me look for another method. If Robert has been doing it successfully, then, chances are he's right. (Perhaps these changes in the Linux kernel are newer than the CentOS kernel.)
I've used dump & restore so many times over the years with Linux systems to believe there is nothing wrong with using dump & restore. Note: dump & restore are only for ext2/ext3. It does not work for riserfs, xfs, etc. I don't know about ext4 (and the problems you've heard about might be related to ext4 or something else).