What about doing all with dd ... If you have the second disk installed in the same machine you can do "dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb" ort you can use clonezilla is a live cd . Gabe On 9/14/10 8:12 AM, "Timothy Murphy" <gayleard at eircom.net> wrote: > > Is there a document with instructions for this? > I've had smartd warnings that a hard disk in my server is sick, > so I am installing a new drive (in addition to the old). > > I was thinking of copying the old root partition with > sudo cp -a -P /* /mnt/hd > (after mounting the prospective new root partition). > Then I'd have to modify the new /etc/fstab . > > Is that a sensible approach?