Copying partitions
David Bandel
david.bandel
Sun Feb 18 19:53:17 PST 2007
On 2/18/07, Jim Conner <jconner at insightbb.com> wrote:
> I'm looking to get a new hard drive(320GB) to replace my current hard
> drive(20GB). I have four partitions on the currend hard drive:
> /
> /home
> /data
> /usr/local/games
> I'm looking to move all the files in these to the new drive, make the drive
> primary master and rerun lilo. I don't really want to reinstall my OS.
> The question I'm asking is how to copy these partitions and keep all the
> permissions and ownership about them. Would dd work? And would the command
> be: dd if=/dev/hda? of=/dev/hdb? Does the respective partitions have to be
> the same size? Or would I have to tarball up each partition and untar them
> in the correct place? I've had problems with this with the length of file
> name.
> Thanks in advance for any and all help.
>
The best way to do this is to use cpio, second best is rsync.
cpio needs a list of files fed to it, so something like:
find / -print | cpio -o | cpio -idm
dd is for duplicating disk information -- not really what you need.
cp -a is not really appropriate for this type of backup
tar does not handle device files or special files
cpio handles all files, but does not recurse directories, needs to be
told what to archive, etc. It is, however, a little more hateful to
use than tar. Redirection is required for both input and output.
cpio takes more getting used to.
rsync will do you better for copying across. cpio looks at file size
and mtime to decide if it needs to copy a file (unless you specify
-u), rsync looks at the two files' data to determine if copying and/or
modifying is necessary.
Which you use just depends. But if you don't have a backup, I suggest
you use something like mindi/mondo to make a CD backup and restore
from that to your new disk. That way, you will have a backup.
Ciao,
David A. Bandel
--
Focus on the dream, not the competition.
- Nemesis Air Racing Team motto
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