On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Denis denis.becker@mnsu.edu wrote:
Hi - I have a NFS/NIS server environment running CentOS 5.5 on a Dell Optiplex 240. I would like to back it up and then move it to a new machine.
You don't mention the type of the new machine. If it is not identical hardware you are probably better off installing a new copy of CentOS on the new machine and then using rsync to copy over any needed data.
Couple of questions:
- This is an older computer Dell Optiplex 240 that I am unable to
connect a USB drive to. In the "linux rescue" environment fdisk -l shows only /dev/hda but lsusb shows the three partitions that are on the drive. I would like to know how to connect the USB drive to the system so I can rsync or dd to the drive.
Not sure about that.
- I was going to rsync a backup, excluding /proc, /sys, /dev and /tmp,
either to a mounted USB drive or to a remote station. I know how to do that but how do I setup the drive up for the restore on the new computer. I have google'd but without success. I would think I need to format the hard drive, then run the LVM tools (<-very ignorant here), and install grub after all the files are in place (maybe mkinitrd too). Is there information avaiable to do this or would some be willing to provide what I would need to accomplish this.
If you are going to identical hardware, you could use clonezilla to copy the drive to an image (either local via USB or to a network file share or an ssh connection) and reverse the process to copy the image back to the drive on your new machine. It is not impossible to make this (or other types of system copies) work on different hardware but you may have to rebuild the initrd with different driver modules. And in any case you will have to reconfigure the network since the MAC address copied from the old machine won't be correct in the new one.