Bill Campbell wrote:
On Tue, Sep 14, 2010, Timothy Murphy 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).
I was thinking of copying the old root partition with sudo cp -a -P /* /mnt/hd (after mounting the prospective new root partition). Then I'd have to modify the new /etc/fstab .
Is that a sensible approach?
IHMO, the most sensible approach is to do a fresh install on a new HD. After the install is complete, install and mount the old HD read-only to allow you to copy things over.
Well, yes.
I just went through this process about 10 days ago when a fan went Tango Uniform on our mail e-mail/file server which had been up 1,390 days before the crash. The old system had two
Urk! What, no kernel updates?
partitions, one for ``/'', the other on ``/home'' making it easy to copy the old ``/home'' to the new one using any of a number of tools. I prefer ``cd /oldhome; find . | cpio -pdum /home'' as it takes care of everything (of course it's important to add the appropriate users and groups before doing this).
Using ``rsync'' would also work, but given that the initial copy is not likely to have anything to update, I prefer ``cpio''.
Does cpio do links, hard and soft? Rsync also gives nice warm fuzzies for progress. <snip> mark