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