On Tue, 4 Dec 2001, Tommy Moore wrote: > Nope if you make the new partition on the second drive and copy > data from the first all you do is boot in with boot disk when > you changed hdb to hda and run lilo. Have done this multiple > times and it's always worked. I agree with this outline, with a few details added. > you may need to acc [add?] lba32 to the top of lilo.conf so > that it'll work with all drives but once you've done that you > should be set to to go. This only applies to recent systems. The lilo documentation says: "Use of LBA32 is recommended on all post-1998 systems" (the standard was adopted in 1998). These systems must be able to "use the Enhanced BIOS packet calls". Many old BIOSes can only boot from the first 1024 cylinders. One solution is to make the first partition within that space, for a small boot partition, containing the /boot directory. 10 or 20 megs should be more than you would ever need. Just enough for the kernels (old and new), and the bootloader map files, etc. If you find that your BIOS can boot with the new extended standards and a recent version of lilo (see the lilo documentation), this is not necessary. Another solution is to boot with LOADLIN instead of LILO. > I'd rather spend 5 minutes doing this than to spend 20 doing a reinstall. Indeed. Once the system is working, one can do a normal upgrade. > You can't do this on a running system though you have to do > this from boot and root disks. Well, you can do it on an new, unmounted drive, on a running system. > Just fdisk the new drive the way you like and format new partition and And the "format" command is really a mkfs (make filesystem) command for your choice of filesystem types (probably mkfs.ext2). But you probably knew that. > then mount the drives on different mount points and then do a > cp -ap . /new_drive > from with in the / directory of old drive and everything should > work. I would add the -x option to that (same as --one-file-system, eg. stay on this file system), or you may have problems with the new mount point being recursively part of the copy -- kind of a mess. With the -x option, you will have to copy one partition at a time, for the old ones. So the new cp command might be (after doing a cd to the root of the partition you are copying: cp -axp * /new_partition_root_dir/ And don't forget to edit the new /etc/fstab to reflect the new layout. > Remember to reboot between the format and fdisk process though. >From the fdisk man page: A sync() and a BLKRRPART ioctl() (reread partition table from disk) are performed before exiting when the partition table has been updated. Long ago it used to be necessary to reboot after the use of fdisk. I do not think this is the case anymore - indeed, rebooting too quickly might cause loss of not-yet-written data. Note that both the kernel and the disk hardware may buffer data. But then, the cfdisk man page still says: W Write partition table to disk (must enter an upper case W). Since this might destroy data on the disk, you must either confirm or deny the write by entering `yes' or `no'. If you enter `yes', cfdisk will write the partition table to disk and the tell the kernel to re-read the partition table from the disk. The re-reading of the partition table works is most cases, but I have seen it fail. Don't panic. It will be correct after you reboot the system. In all cases, I still recommend rebooting the system--just to be safe. So watch for warnings when you finally write the new table. And here's a tip from the sfdisk man page: For best results, you should always use an OS-specific partition table program. For example, you should make DOS partitions with the DOS FDISK program and Linux partitions with the Linux sfdisk program. So you would leave some empty space in the early cylinder part of your drive for MS-DOS, for later. Early, because that OS may balk at being booted from the latter part of a big disk. Note that some users here may prefer sfdisk, because of it's total command line orientation, and scriptable behavior. Now, I know you don't want that old drive to stop when you reboot, so you would shutdown without the -p (power off) option. On my system (RedHat), this would mean editing the last line of the /etc/rc.d/init.d/halt script, to remove that option. If I remember right, you run debian, so you would have to look around a bit, maybe, for an equivalent. This might not be necessary if you have set your bios, as I have, to not power off on shutdown, or if your bios or motherboard do not behave that way. LCR -- L. C. Robinson reply to no_spam+munged_lcr@onewest.net.invalid People buy MicroShaft for compatibility, but get incompatibility and instability instead. This is award winning "innovation". Find out how MS holds your data hostage with "The *Lens*"; see "CyberSnare" at http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html