Replacing Hard Drive

[Duston, Hal]

Gene,

Replacing to do impending failure?  If you can install 
the new drive alongside the old one, then you should be 
able to use cpio to copy everything.  First to a mkfs on 
the new drive, then mount the new drive somewhere, say, 
/Disk.  Then use find+cpio to copy all files from / to 
/Disk.  Be sure to use all cpio options that preserve 
owner, mode, and all date/time's.  Also be sure that you 
don't try to copy the /Disk directory into /Disk/Disk.

Some examples from the HP/UX "find" man.

      Copy the entire file system to a disk mounted on /Disk, avoiding the
      recursive copy problem.  Both commands are equivalent (note the use of
      -path instead of -name):

           cd /; find . ! -path ./Disk -only -print | cpio -pdxm /Disk
           cd /; find . -path ./Disk -prune -o -print | cpio -pdxm /Disk

      Copy the root disk to a disk mounted on /Disk, skipping all mounted
      file systems below /.  Note that -xdev does not cause / to be skipped,
      even though it is a mount point.  This is because / is the starting
      point and -xdev only affects entries below starting points.

           cd /;  find . -xdev -print | cpio -pdxm /Disk

I _think_ that these are equivalent if your entire system is on one drive.
I don't have a Linux box handy, but this should work, with these or similiar

options.

Good luck,
Hal
H:hald at sound.net
W:hdusto01 at sprintspectrum.com

on Wednesday, September 27, 2000 at 12:23 PM
   Gene Dascher [gedascher at multiservice.com] wrote:
> I might have to replace the hard drive in my Linux Box and 
> was wondering if there was an easy way to transfer my 
> existing configuration over to the new drive.  Or would I 
> be better off installing Linux from scratch and restoring
> my data from backups.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Gene Dascher
> Multi Service Corp.
> gedascher at multiservice.com
> (913)663-9415