Moving from 40 to 80 GB Laptop Drive - How?

[Charles Curley]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 04:33:46PM -0400, Chris Ruprecht wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm getting myself a new 80 GB drive for my laptop which currently has a 40 GB 
> drive. I have a USB 2.0 port as well as a FireWire card in the laptop, so I 
> have full access to both drives at the same time.
> The current drive has the /boot, / and swap partition on it. The new drive 
> should also have all three partitions, just that the root (/) partition 
> should be larger than the current one, the other 2 partitions can stay the 
> same.
> I do not want to re-install FC4 from scratch as I have the system nicely tunes 
> to do what I want, how I want it.

I take it you plan to remove the 40 GB drive and replace it with the
80. So you need a hard drive transplant.

Rather than get fancy, I would use fdisk to create the partitions I
want (think about using some of that 80 GB for a separate /home
partition). Then build file systems as approriate. I would then mount
each one as appropriate and copy files with "cp -rp...". (I know,
folks, thre are other ways to do it. This is the easy way.)

One reason that may fail is if your present fstab selects partitions
with labels. The work-around is to change the entries in the copy of
fstab to use the device file names (/dev/hda3, etc.) instead.

That leaves getting grub installed on the new drive. "dd"ing that
won't work, the geometry/LBA addressing will be off. Instead, build a
boot disk CD-ROM on the old drive. Swap the drives. Use the CD-ROM to
boot the new drive, and (as root) run "grub-install".

Then carefully package up the old drive and put it away. You have an
archived snapshot as of the date you stopped using it.

-- 

Charles Curley                  /"\    ASCII Ribbon Campaign
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