one-shot hard drive replacement

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Hi folks,

My old IBM IDE 120GB drive was getting old and full and I purchased a new one of 500 GB so I wanted to have an exact copy of my windows and linux partitions on the new one, thinking I could later expand or play with the partition sizes.

So I thought I could use dd to copy byte-for-byte, unplug the old one, plug the new one and it will work…
This was a little mistake. Some things from Linux are related not only to sda and sdb but also to disk-by-id. And neither Windows was booting.

I prefer to have only one hard disk, because my computer is a Shuttle where 2 HDD simultaneously do not really fit or are too hot.

So I inserted the OpenSuse Live CD, tried to repair the GRUB and the loading process, with both hard drives connected.
Now the GRUB is loading from the MBR (I guess the sdb), it is mounting the new HDD to /data2/, but it is mounting the old as /home and swap…

I don’t manage to get out of my problems, I would like to never have to work with HDD at the same time and don’t get rid of the problem.

If I am close to the solution and missing something, any help is appreciated.

If you go back to my initial desire ad have an easy solution, I’ll also appreciate !

Best regards,
Rmatt

#2

The newer versions of openSUSE use a disk-by-id boot in the fstab. But this is easy to fix.

I read that typically one needs to reboot windows at least twice to get it to run after a cloning.

Also, it is extremely important, after cloning, that one remove the old drive completely, and put the new drive in the exact same cable position, with the exact same jumper settings (ie if old was cable select, put the new cable select, … if the old was master, put the new as master). If one decides not to do this, then I have read of users having problems.

Note also there are solutions other than cloning.

IMHO after cloning, if you connect both drives at the same time, you could end up really messing up both MS-Windows partitions on both drives. Its not a good idea to do that. Do NOT connect both at the same time after cloning. Do NOT.

You need to be very careful here as you may have already created a lot of problems.