On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 10:00 AM, Dan Rue <drue at therub.org> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 09:35:54AM -0500, Adam Monsen wrote: > > * use dd to clone the whole disk onto a larger disk > > * use parted to grow the partition > > * use resize2fs to grow the filesystem > > dd is a good tool, but it's best to understand what it does. dd copies > data at the block level - it cares not about the data, or the > partitioning, or anything like that. Chunk in, chunk out. It's great > for doing things like: > > "Oh, I need a 100MB test file" > dd if=/dev/random of=100MB_test_file bs=1M count=1024 > > I think dd is bad, however, for moving disks. > > First, unless your disks are exactly the same size, you might/will run > into problems (perhaps with some filesystems you can adjust them after > the fact). Second, it's inefficient. Say you're moving from a 200GB > hard drive to a 400GB hard drive, and you're using about 40GB of your > 200GB hard drive. DD will copy 200GB, even though you're only using > 40GB. That's right, it'll copy 160GB of empty space, because it doesn't > know better. Also, you'll end up with 200GB partitions on the 400GB > drive. > > I've always preferred to setup the partitions on a new device and then > use a higher level tool to move the data over to the new locations. This is good advice too. I would use "rsync -av /source /destination" to copy your files from a high level, then reinstall grub to the MBR of your new drive. See the rsync man for more options. This method also gives you the opportunity to switch up file systems if you want (though, I would recommend ext3 for your system partitions). Andy -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20081016/d87d6129/attachment.htm