A bigger hard drive?

georgeinacton · October 21, 2011, 3:37pm

I am not sure if this is the right place to post this question?

I have a SUSE 11.4 system that is working well. I would like to move it on to a larger hard drive. Normally with Windoze, I use Norton Ghost to copy partitions onto a larger or smaller HD and it works very well for Windoze in my experience. I use an older version (Ghost 2003) that boots from a floppy and does all the cloning, copying, compressing in DOS. It works.

I did once try to do this with a SUSE HD (not recently) and it did not work. I believe that the disk copied ok but when I tried to run it, SUSE was not happy because the disk ID did not match what was in the software (the SUSE woke up on a different HD).

Is there a better way to do this? to clone to a larger drive?

Thanks,

George

martin_helm · October 21, 2011, 4:04pm

Last time I did that I just used the dd command to copy from a 250 to a
500GB hd and as far as I remember (it was quite a while ago) the only thing
I had to change afterwards was the grub entries which used the hd id’s.
(The dd of course not from the running system but from an arbitray live cd I
had floating around, if I am not wrong it was just an openSUSE live cd but
everything else should be fine).

georgeinacton · October 21, 2011, 5:19pm

Thanks Martin,

I found dd by typing

dd --help

in a terminal window. I will study up on dd. I don’t have the other drive attached yet. Does the target drive need to be formatted already or can it have no partiions? With Ghost I can clone the drive pretty effortlessly and fast and what it builds seems to be exact.

Maybe the stuff about changing the drive identifiers is what I needed to do. I have only heard of grub, not worked with it. Is there a FAQ for a newbie?

martin_helm · October 21, 2011, 5:33pm

georgeinacton wrote:

>
> Thanks Martin,
>
> I found dd by typing
> Code:
> --------------------
> dd --help
> --------------------
> in a terminal window. I will study up on dd. I don’t have the other
> drive attached yet. Does the target drive need to be formatted already
> or can it have no partiions? With Ghost I can clone the drive pretty
> effortlessly and fast and what it builds seems to be exact.
>
> Maybe the stuff about changing the drive identifiers is what I needed
> to do. I have only heard of grub, not worked with it. Is there a FAQ for
> a newbie?
>
I just mentioned dd to show there is no need for any external program
(nothing needs to be formatted to use it it makes a raw copy).
Use you favourite program for the duplication you do not need what I used
and when you switched to the new harddrive (which will of course not boot)
have a look at supergrub to easily repair this.
http://www.supergrubdisk.org/
Hope the link explains it good enough for you there is also a video.

djh-novell · October 21, 2011, 5:51pm

martin_helm wrote:
> Last time I did that I just used the dd command to copy from a 250 to a
> 500GB hd and as far as I remember (it was quite a while ago) the only thing
> I had to change afterwards was the grub entries which used the hd id’s.
> (The dd of course not from the running system but from an arbitray live cd I
> had floating around, if I am not wrong it was just an openSUSE live cd but
> everything else should be fine).

I’m not sure what you’re proposing. If he copies the raw device, the OP
will only be able to use part of the new disk, the same size as the old
disk, without subsequent hacking. If he copies individual partitions,
there’s then a lot of fiddling about to get it to recognize the extra
space and extend filesystems.

I’d have thought it was easier to just format the new disk as desired
and then use cp or tar or rsync to copy the files.

If the system uses disk-ids, they will still need adjusting in any case,
of course.

brunomcl · October 21, 2011, 8:55pm

What works for me is:

Get latest Partition Magic liveCD (can’t live without it, best generic “OMG what do I do now?” tool IMO :))
Install second drive, boot from it, clone one drive to another. If you intend to re-dimension more than the last partition on disk then clone only up to the first partition you’ll redimension.
Re-dimension (usually enlarge) the last partition from PM liveCD. If there will be more partition to re-dimension, create a new partition in the new disk the same size or a bit larger than that.
clone the next partition ont the new one, re-dimension, etc. this can be a bit tricky, as you are cloning just a specific partition in another one. Don’t get your partitions wrong or you’ll have to restart from the beggining.
boot from oS install DVD, repair grub. Done.

I’m sure there are many other/better/righter ways to do it, this is only what works for me.

georgeinacton · October 21, 2011, 11:37pm

brunomcl - the last step #5 - repair grub. You do this wih a bootable SUSE install disk? I guess that is the part that I would like to know how to do. I am comfortable and confident enough with Norton Ghost to do steps 1-4 but need to know how to do #5. Thanks. George

jdmcdaniel3 · October 22, 2011, 2:49am

Let me say that the last time I copied my /home partition, to another hard drive, leaving the main / partition in place, here is what I did. I first created a partition on the new hard drive that was identical in type and size to the old /home and I did not mount it. I then used the following command to copy it:

su -
password:
dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/dev/sdb1

Once the copy was complete, I then used the YaST / System / Partitioner to resize the partition to all of the disk. I then had to edit my /etc/fstab file to point to the new /home. Once it was up and running with my new /home, I removed the old /home, leaving more room for /. I then booted from a LiveCD and used the YaST Partitioner to resize / to all of the boot disk. I did not move my boot partition and so I don’t know what you might want to do, but it is an example of what you could do.

Thank You,