Re: cloning bootable hard drive

["John Abreau-2" <user=184@nabble.blu.org>]

 You might also have to rebuild initrd; I did a disk upgrade 
last week that failed at the end until I figured out that 
I had to run mkinitrd before it would see the volume group 
within /dev/md1. 

I had a 1U server with a single 80 gb disk I had purchased 
on eBay back inthe summer, and I decided to upgrade it 
to a RAID-1 pair of 750 gb disks before deploying it to 
production. I had used LVM on the 80 gb disk when I first 
installed CentOS, so I was able to shuffle things around 
within LVM to move everything except /boot onto the new 
drives. I copied over /boot with dump and restore, followed 
by a grub-install and a mkinitrd. 


Jarod Wilson wrote: 
> On Wed, 2008-02-27 at 09:46 -0500, Derek Atkins wrote: 
>   
>> Jarod Wilson <[hidden email]> writes: 
>> 
>>     
>>>> How are you copying the drive?  I would do: 
>>>> 
>>>>  dd if=/dev/<olddrive> of=/dev/<newdrive> bs=1m 
>>>>         
>>> Assuming <newdrive> is at least as big as <olddrive>, that should work 
>>> too. Some potential fixups needed to make proper use of additional space 
>>> on a larger drive though. I went from a 120G drive to a 250G drive in my 
>>> laptop, and wanted to expand each of my partitions, so my previously 
>>> mentioned rsync method worked much better for me. 
>>>       
>> True, the dd assumes the new drive is >= the old drive, 
>> which is usually the case nowadays.  Yes, you need to do 
>> some special work to make more use of the space.  However 
>> if you wanted to redo ALL the paritions then you will lose 
>> your bootability because the MBR wont point to the right 
>> place to find the boot loader.  So you'd need to re-install 
>> grub. 
>>     
> 
> Yep, that's the last step of my rsync dance. :) 
> 
> 
>