I’ve Googled, and searched this Forum for an answer to a question that I have without result.
I have a perfectly well running openSuSE 11.0 on my Compaq Presario V6000 Notebook. The present HDD is 160 GB, and I’ve just gotten a new 250 compatable HDD. I also have the USB case to enclose it.
What I would like to do is move everything to my new HDD then replace my existing drive so that I have more storage.
What app should I try? TIA for any responses. I would have thought that this would be simple, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. LOL!
Well, you could wait 16 days, get 11.1, swap the drives, install 11.1 on the machine with the now bigger disk, and then copy your home directories over.
Thanks for that, and I know what you mean. However, I have been there and done that with trying to copy Home. I’ve always lost all my Evolution e-mails, and other hidden files.
I’d just like to clone my existing HDD to my new HDD without fear of failure. If I am wrong here please let me know.
Assuming everything is really under /home, it can be copied over without losing any files. If you were using a GUI to copy you might not see all the files; it might not show you hidden files. But it can be done from the CLI.
I did this once, this past year. The only problem I had was with the disk IDs in menu.lst and fstab. Booting the cloned disk produced a panic saying it couldn’t find the (old) disk. For example, the source entries might have been:
but because you will be plomping the images onto a new hdd, the disk ID string, i.e.,
WDC_WD2500KS-00_WD-WCANKJ299238 will change.
If you download the manufacturers diagnostic disk (WD Diagnostics, or Disk Care, or whatnot in my case) you can get the string to put in. What I did, though (to be certain), was do the cloning then create another partition and do a fresh install into it, then look at its fstab/menu.lst to make sure I had the exact string right. Then use a live CD (or that new install) to mount the install that needs changing and use an editor to change the strings.
Worked like a charm, and I now use the extra (created) partition as a test bed.
Yes, everything is under Home. I’ve tried many times to get this to work without success. I started with SuSE 8.0 and have used every Linux Distro that you can think of since.
Copying Home just does not work.
I’m looking for that app that “clones” my present HDD to another device. In this case my new 250 Gb HDD.
Cloning is not as easy as the word sounds. You can run into issues with the partition names and the boot loader. And since it isn’t an identical disk, it isn’t a clone really and the last partition should expand.
Copying /home isn’t so difficult. To start off, partition your new disk so that /home is allocated a partition and format it. Then do this as root from the CLI.
cd /home
cp -a * /media/external/home
Now swap the disks and install 11.1 on it, but telling the installer not to format /home. It should detect that you have already a home directory when you set up an account and use that.
you can mount the new hdd in usb and move the / to the new hdd.
make sure there is no interruptions during the move.
after moving you will have to adjust grub and fstab:)
