Subject: Re: How to migrate a Debian system to another hard drive?

From: Ken Gaugler <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Sep 1996 14:34:00 -0700

At 07:20 AM 9/3/96 -0600, you wrote:
>
>Is there a simple way to migrate a Debian system to another hard drive?
>
>On our Debian system, we have two hard drives.  The primary drive has the
>root directory and swap partition and is bootable.  It also contains the
>various Debian software packages, programs, libraries, etc.  The second
>drive just has the /home directory tree. 
>
>Our problem is that the primary drive is starting to make some "expensive
>sounding noises" and may not last much longer.  We would like simply to
>migrate the entire system to the second hard drive and disconnect the
>first drive.  Is there an easy way to do this without reinstalling the
>entire system and fixing up all the configuration files?
>
>Thanks,
>
>//  Tim Egbert
>//  Bioengineering Lab, Anesthesiology Department
>//  University of Utah Health Sciences Center
>
>
>

I have done this under other flavors of UNIX by doing a full dump
to tape, then doing a fresh install of just a base system, then
doing a full restore from tape.  As I recall, some of the symbolic
links didn't come back right and I had to tweak them manually, but
I got the systems up and running without too much pain.

I am interested to hear others' opinions about this.
---
Key fingerprint =  D6 A7 D7 8C 92 CB 42 FD  60 D5 62 1C D7 B9 EA 8E 
Ken Gaugler  N6OSK         Hybrid Networks, Inc.  Cupertino, Calif.
URL: www.hybrid.com (home: [email-masked]  URL: users.aimnet.com/~keng)
"The life of a Repo Man is ALWAYS INTENSE..."

---

From: Casper BodenCummins <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 1996 12:47:28 +0100

I'm surprised this important question has run for so long. Is it in a
Linux FAQ?

Anyhow, here's my contribution ( hopefully this'll wrap it up ;-> ):

   cd /; find . -path ./mnt -prune -o print | cpio -pdxm /mnt

This copies the whole disk to the mount point /mnt, avoiding the
recursive traversal and preserving device files, links and modification
times.

Casper Boden-Cummins.