[CentOS] Transferring system to new drive

Mon Sep 20 12:56:52 UTC 2010
Kevin Thorpe <kevin at pibenchmark.com>

  On 17/09/2010 22:52, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Timothy Murphy wrote:
>
>> Marcelo M. Garcia wrote:
>>
>>>> I was thinking of copying the old root partition with
>>>> sudo cp -a -P /* /mnt/hd
>>> I think the command rsync is a better approach for this task. It has
>>> much more features, for example, you can exclude certain files.
>> Thanks for the suggestion.
> Thanks for all the responses.
>
> Further to my query,
> I'm wondering if one can safely copy partitions
> (in particular the root partition / )
> while the system is running.
>
> The reason that I ask is that I'm slightly afraid
> the machine will not re-boot into single-user mode
> with the present OS on the sick disk.
>
telinit 1 doesn't require a reboot and shuts down most things which 
could update
disk while leaving the platters spinning. I understand your fears about 
it not restarting,
I've had problems like that in the past and now I at least try to 
extract as much info as
I can from the sick drive before risking powering it down.