[CentOS] EL6: Hard Disk upgrade howto?

On 08/02/2011 06:16 AM, Benjamin Smith wrote:
> On Saturday, July 30, 2011 06:00:26 PM Yves Bellefeuille wrote:
>
>  > On Friday 29 July 2011 22:45, Benjamin Smith wrote:
>
>  > > I have a tested copy of EL6 that I would like to duplicate to a
>
>  > > number of similar servers, but can't seem to find a sane howto on the
>
>  > > subject. TLDP's "Hard disk upgrade howto" is embarrassingly
>
>  > > antiquated: when's the last time you saw LILO?
>
>  >
>
>  > When I wrote that How-To, I wanted to copy Linux from a 120 Mb hard disk
>
>  > to a 250 Mb hard disk.
>
>  >
>
>  > I've thought about updating the How-To, but I assumed that modern hard
>
>  > disks are so large that people no longer needed to copy Linux just
>
>  > because they ran out of disk space.
>
>  >
>
>  > Even back then, the How-To wasn't intended for someone who wanted to
>
>  > make several copies. As others have suggested, Clonezilla seems
>
>  > appropriate for your situation: http://clonezilla.org/
>
>  >
>
>  > I still use LILO to boot from thumb drives, by the way.
>
>
> I feel like I'm speaking to an old friend. =) I did several upgrades with
> that guide until RH switched to grub. It's been painful ever since. :/
> Mostly, I throw in new drives and mount them all over the place. I have
> systems with a 20 GB / partition with up to 10 TB of drives and partitions
> crufted all over the place. (yuk!)
>
>
> My issue is that the instructions for LILO don't do much for me with
> respect to grub. There's numerous howtos mention hdparms and partition
> numbers and chroot and stuff, but nothing that spells it out for a dolt
> like me.
>
>
> ... and nobody here's suggested a recommended way to do this. I would
> *love* it if somebody who knew could ammend your excellent howto with
> information on grub. (which has been the RHEL/CentOS default for several
> years)
>
>
> I tried using Clonezilla to clone a 300 GB SAS drive to a 1 TB SATA drive.
> I don't care *at* *all* if there's some wasted space - I just want it to
> *work*. But it thew a screen full of random textual garbage on the screen
> and not much helpful information when I hit the "go" button.

Have you tried "dd if=<old-drive> of=<new-drive> bs=4096"? That may be slow 
but it usually is the best bet to get an exact copy of the old disk (the 
new disk must at least have the same size as the old one of course).

Regards,
   Dennis