Re: [gentoo-user] Moving root filesystem to a new partition

[Dale]

Alan E. Davis wrote:
> Can someone tell me what steps are necessary to move the / filesystem
> to a new partition?  I recall someone helping me with this before, but
> cannot find the email.  The oldest of three drives on my system had my
> / partition, /dev/sdc1.  One day recently, that partition became
> inaccessable.  After quickly installing Ubuntu on a different drive,
> that root partition eventually showed up again.
>
> So I've been able to boot Gentoo again off the separate /boot
> partition on /dev/sda1.  I need to move that / partition.  I have
> several other partitions mounted off this one, mainly as /usr and
> maybe /usr/local/, and some storage partitions mounted to my home
> directory.
>
> I copied the root (/) partition with the new partition at /dev/sdb5
> mounted as /newroot, using
>     # cp -ax / /newroot
>
> I checked that /proc, /dev, and /sys are there, and empty.  I recall
> there are some other steps necessary.  I changed /etc/fstab, and the
> grub2 grub.cfg from ubuntu, the entry for this kernel.  The boot
> stalls at a certain point.
>
> May I ask what steps are necessary to do this?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Alan Davis

I have done this in the past.  I usually boot the CD, make mount points 
for old and new, then mount the old and new that I want to copy.  Then I 
do a cp -av /path/to/old /path/to/new/ and let it copy.  This can take 
quite a bit of time tho.  It seems those little bitty files take the 
longest.  Maybe omitting the -v option would help on that?

Once you get it copied over, edit your fstab file as needed on the new 
side and install the bootloader as well.  After that, it usually just works.

Dale

:-)  :-) 

P. S.  Sorry for not including some fancy tarball stuff.  ;-)