[CentOS] Disc Cloning Question

Tue Apr 6 22:08:08 UTC 2010
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

Joseph L. Casale wrote:
>> If I were doing it, I'd forget lvm on the new drive and just make the md 
>> devices, mkfs them, mount them somewhere temporarily, copy stuff over 
>> with 'cp -a', 'tar | tar', 'dump | restor', 'rsync -av', etc.,
>> edit fstab to mount the new md devices for / and /boot, fix grub and 
>> swap the drives.  If you have to worry about growing files, do an rsync 
>> once live, then go to single user mode and repeat (the second run will 
>> fix anything that changed and will go pretty quickly).
>>     
>
> I'm sold, it really doesn't need lvm. I presume after editing fstab the
> nonexistent lvm config can be ignored? Never done that...
>   

you can use the dump ... | restore thing with lvm, it doesn't care.

What _I_ do, anyways is...

    * build new storage however I like,
    * reboot to single user
    * temp mount new filesystems as /new/.... (eg, / is /new, /var is
      /new/var, /new/home, etc)
    * for each file system,
          dump -0uf - /dev/mapper/VolGroup.....  | (cd /new/... ;
      restore -rvf - )
    * manually fix up boot stuff, manually edit /new/etc/fstab
    * umount new stuff, shut down, juggle disks, pray it works...