[CentOS] Moving hard drives

Tue Mar 2 00:57:50 UTC 2010
Kwan Lowe <kwan.lowe at gmail.com>

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Slack-Moehrle
<mailinglists at mailnewsrss.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I have a server that is running nicely, except I have hit the maximum RAM (4gb) and I wish to add more.
>
> It is an ASUS board, AMD X64 dual core, nvidia nic.
>
> What I want going to move to is a dell board, Intel Pentium M dual code, which supports 8gb of RAM.
>
> Can I just unplug the HD and move it to the new server and boot it up?
>
> I assume that the NIC will need to be re-setup, but what other issues would there be?
>
> I am not running X at all. Doing apache, zimbra, mysql.

If you're worried, use a tool such as g4l to make an exact duplicate
of your system. You boot with the G4L disk then clone the HD to an
external HD or a network accessible share. Then boot the new with the
G4L disk then reimage the drive from the backup.

The ease with which this is done is all relative. Unlike MS Windows,
which can have lots of problems when moving to a new system, Linux
installations generally move quite easily.  In fact, the initrd on
CentOS contains many generic modules so at worst case it can often
fall back to a compatible module.  To inspect the initrd you can copy
the existing initrd.img to file such as foo.img.gz, gunzip, then use
cpio to extract the foo.img file. Once you do that you will see the
many modules that exist.

Going from ATA to SCSI or SATA will have some issues, generally with
fstab but that's to be expected.  Other than that, no real problems.

BTW, prior to reading your email I'd posted another message about
moving Xen systems from one system to another.  The Xen infrastructure
can hide a lot of the system specific internals so you may consider
virtualizing if you think this may be a regular occurence.