[CentOS] Clone ATA to SATA HDD

[MHR]

On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Shade.GE <shade.ge at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Here comes the challende, i need to clone that ATA disc to a SATA disc.
> The thing is, i don't longer need the LVM structure because i need so
> make a softraid 1 later.
> My plan was:
>
> 1. Boot from a live cd and rsync all content to the sata disc.
> 2. Partition /boot (sda1), / (sda3), and swap (sda2)  (sda1 bootable)
> 2. Make a new initrd image without LVM
> 3. Install grub on /dev/sda1
> 3. Boot as test
> 4. Make a softraid 1 with the second SATA drive.
>

May I suggest a different approach?

0. Set your boot PROM to treat your SATA disk as a non-RAID drive (ATA or AHCI).
1. Boot from your ATA disk (no need to boot from anywhere else).
2. Partition the SATA disk (or wipe the ones you already made clean).
3. Copy all files from the ATA disk to the SATA disk.
4. Grub-install the SATA disk.
5. Re-boot and change the boot drive settings in the PROM.
6. Reboot into your shiny new SATA CentOS!

Be aware that if you change the order of the boot drives, that can
confuse grub, so you may need to intervene manually at stage 2 to make
sure it loads from the right drive.

I don't think the LVM vs. manual VM will make much of a difference,
but the RAID might unless you go with a strictly software RAID
(because you'll almost certainly run into hardware issues).

Is your SATA drive mounted as a RAID drive or an ATA-extension (I
forget the exact terminology) in the boot PROM?  That can also make a
significant difference.

HTH

mhr