Move existing install from one HD to another

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Hello all,

I have been running Suse 10.3 off of an external Firewire hard drive on my Apple iBook (ppc).

I am so impressed that I am ready to get a new Mac Mini so I can use my iBook as a full time Suse Linux machine.

I have put so much time and effort into customizing Suse that I am hoping beyond hope that there is some method that will allow for transferring my existing installation on the external drive over to my iBooks internal hard drive.

Please clue me in.

Thanks,

William

#2

I never done it before, but I would have thought you can backup the old system, install a fresh system and then restore from the backup file.

If it’s the same machine I can’t see what the problem would be.

Gui’s, email, all I would have thought.

As I said I have never done that though.

#3

Well, good news is that this is not to big of a job (you are staying on the same hardware and only your partition layout is being modified)

Basically you can use an imaging tool like ghost, bootit, partimage… have your choice, clone your partition or disk to the new disk (I personally like using a bootit cd for this chore which can do this for free).
*don’t forget to mark your boot partition as active!

After doing this you can boot with the openSUSE install CD/DVD or LiveCD and modify these files to reflect to new partition locations:

/boot/grub/menu.1st
/boot/grub/device.map
/boot/grub
/etc/fstab
/etc/mtab

after this the system should boot normally.

some more info here (you don’t have to do the initrd thing seeing your hardware is the same):
Good Things To Know When Imaging Linux To Different Hardware - openSUSE Forums

Hope that helps,
Wj

#4

good news as this won’t be too hard at all as same hardware. partimage as mentioned above is very useful, or you could use mondo recovery which is also very good and reliable. lets you create bootable discs by taking images of your partitions. so just suggesting that as an option also. as said above, will need to edit grub, fstab etc

#5

Thanks all,

I think that is enough to get me going. Might have to write up a how-to when I am done.

William