How to clone to a higher capacity replacement drive?

English Hardware
1

Cloning a bootable drive…

It is quite possible this may have already been covered in a previous post.
(If so please point me to it! THANKS)

Some of us are ready to replace the drives in our machines to bigger, higher capacity, drives.

The old way of doing it is simply replace the drive and re-install EVEYTHING!

Some of the sharper, more experienced users know how to clone the existing drive on to a larger/higher capacity drive.
Then installing the fully functioning, bootable drive, on your machine and WALLAH!
Look at all that new space!

I have a new high capacity drive in an enclosure connected to my laptop via a USB or firewire connection.
How do I tell Suse Linux (11 - 11.2) to clone itself onto the new drive so I can then use it to replace the tiny hard drive in there now?

In Advance, I thank you.

Rr

2

install ddrescue and use that. I’ve cloned many drives with it and so far it never failed.

Also, before cloning, i’d recommend using device names (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, etc) instead of disk IDs for your drives… you chould change that in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst and in /etc/sysconfig/bootloader

3

You could also take a look here: Cloning an old drive to a new drive - openSUSE Forums
… pay careful attention to the precautions … for example, after cloning and disconnecting, NEVER re-connect the two drives to the PC at the same time again as that will typically mess things up.