Hardware upgrade advice needed

[Robert L Cochran]

Bill Gradwohl wrote:

> Thomas E. Dukes wrote:
>
>> I would like to move my current system to a new PC.  I'm not sure the 
>> best
>> way to do this.
>>
>> What I was thinking was to move the harddrive to the new computer and 
>> let
>> fedora recognize and update the new hardware.  Will this work?  The 
>> 'newer'
>> PC is an IBM NetVista 6792-3MU.
>>
>> Assuming the above will work, I then like to add an additional 
>> harddrive and
>> move /home and /var to the new drive.  Can I just format and 
>> partition the
>> new drive and move the files from the old drive to the new drive?
>>
>> Then, I would also like to increase the swap space on the old drive to
>> double the RAM.  Can the swap be resized?
>>  
>>
> You didn't mention what O/S you're running (FC1, FC2, etc) and what 
> O/S you intend to run (FC3 perhaps).
>
> Think about this.
> Install the new box with the new hardware just the way you want it. 
> Then connect the old drive to the new box for the purposes of copying 
> whatever it is you want off the old drive on to the new setup.
>
> The benefit of this approach is that you can put the old drive back in 
> the old box and nothing has changed. Its a fall back position in case 
> something goes wrong. Your approach leaves you with nothing if things 
> go wrong.
>
I like Bill's advice. 

In the past I have needed to duplicate an existing system onto a larger 
hard drive. There is a How-To on www.tldp.org that covers doing that.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hard-Disk-Upgrade/index.html

Of course you need to create the right partitions on the new drive. 
Don't forget to re-create disk labels with e2label.

Bob