System Drive Backup Solution

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2005-05-21 at 07:12, Chris Ruprecht wrote:
> I want to migrate my system drive to a new, better, bigger disk drive
> and need to back up what I have. Is there a tool out there, that lets
> me do this?
> The tool should be able to boot of a floppy/CD, partition the drive to
> something sensible, the same way the current system drive is and then
> restore the previously backed up data so everything is back where it
> used to be, same permissions, same ownership, same links and symlinks.

Assuming you can connect both the new and old drives at once and that
you know your way around fdisk and mkfs:

Boot your fedora install CD and type 'linux rescue' at the boot prompt.
Make partitions and filesystems on the new drive that match the old
ones or are larger.  Be sure to include a swap partition and run
mkswap on it.   Make some directories and mount both old and new
filesystems and for each set, cd into the old and
'cp -a . /path/to/new'. 
Then either label the new partitions to match the old ones or adjust the
references in what will be the new /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.conf
to use partition names. (Note that you can't have duplicate labels, so
if you use labels you'll have to remove the old drive from the system
or change those labels before the system will boot). 
Then all that is left is re-installing grub.  If you can figure out
the documentation about how to specify that the drive will be moved
you can do it now.  Otherwise, move the new drive, boot the CD again
with 'linux rescue' and if your fstab is correct it will mount the
system and suggest a chroot command for making repairs.  Do that, then
'grub-install device_name', then 'exit' twice and the system should
come up working.

Alternatively, if your existing system is installed on LVM (which FC3
would do by default) you could add the new drive as additional space
and keep the old one.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com