[CentOS] Replacing a hard drive

Fri Mar 16 16:34:02 UTC 2007
Bowie Bailey <Bowie_Bailey at BUC.com>

John R Pierce wrote:
> 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. 
> > 
> > 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'm assuming you're using straight ext3 without LVM or raid....
> 
> I'd probably boot the regular CD into rescue mode, without mounting
> the file systems, then partition the new disk to suit (making each
> partition at least as large as the original drive, and in the same
> order, then run something like....
> 
> this assumes new drive is hda, old drive is hdb
> 
> mkdir /mnt/src /mnt/dst
> for f in 1 2 5 6; do
>     mount /dev/hdb$f /mnt/src
>     mount /dev/hda$f /mnt/dst
>     dump 0f - /mnt/src | (cd /mnt/dst; restore rf - )
>     umount /mnt/dst /mnt/src
> end
> mkswap /dev/hda3
> mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/dst && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dst/boot
> chroot /mnt/dst
> grub-install /dev/hda
> ^z
> umount /mnt/dsk/boot; umount /mnt/dsk
> 
> adjust file and device names to suit.     dump to restore like that
> creates a very accurate copy of a file system, complete with special
> files, links, ACLs, permissions, etc, etc intact.
> 
> now, swap the new drive
> 
> 
> (where 1, 2, 5, 6 are your file system partitions, leaving out your
> swap which I'm guessing is hda3)

I attempted this method with a few modifications and I'm mostly done.

I partitioned the new drive and created the filesystems.  I then mounted
them one by one and copied the information over.  There is a bad inode
that caused 'dump' to crash, so I used 'rsync -a' to make the copy
instead.

When I tried to do the 'chroot' and 'grub-install', grub complained that
it didn't have a device file (which it didn't, /dev/ was empty).  So I
copied the '/dev/hda*' files from the rescue environment to the
destination hard drive and tried again.  This time, the 'grub-install'
ran fine.

Now the problem is that when I try to boot, I get the world's worst
error message: "GRUB GRUB GRUB...".  I read that this can be fixed by
setting your bios to manual rather than auto for the hard drives, but
that didn't work for me.  What else can I do?  I think everything is
copied to the new drive, I just need to convince it to boot.

-- 
Bowie