Re: [gentoo-user] ghosting(?) a drive

[Jonathan A. Kollasch]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 02:50:22PM -0800, maxim wexler wrote:
> intention of moving my entire gentoo OS over to it
> from a flaky 120G ATA drive(reiserfs). Hopefully, I
> can just boot up from the new drive as if nothing had
> changed.
>
> Can anybody recommend any tool(s) for the job?
> Gotchas? Does SATA prefer a certain fs?

If the new drive has a greater or equal number of blocks than the old you could boot a LiveCD then dd(1) the old device (something like "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda" IIRC) onto the new device. You then should be able to boot directly off of the new drive.

Or you could create new file systems on the new drive then cp -PRp or rsync the old data to the new drive. In the later case you'd need to reinstall GRUB or LILO.

Be sure to not erase the old drive until you're sure the data got copied correctly.

	Jonathan Kollasch