On Sat, 2005-05-21 at 07:12, Chris Ruprecht wrote: > I want to migrate my system drive to a new, better, bigger disk drive > and need to back up what I have. Is there a tool out there, that lets > me do this? > The tool should be able to boot of a floppy/CD, partition the drive to > something sensible, the same way the current system drive is and then > restore the previously backed up data so everything is back where it > used to be, same permissions, same ownership, same links and symlinks. Assuming you can connect both the new and old drives at once and that you know your way around fdisk and mkfs: Boot your fedora install CD and type 'linux rescue' at the boot prompt. Make partitions and filesystems on the new drive that match the old ones or are larger. Be sure to include a swap partition and run mkswap on it. Make some directories and mount both old and new filesystems and for each set, cd into the old and 'cp -a . /path/to/new'. Then either label the new partitions to match the old ones or adjust the references in what will be the new /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.conf to use partition names. (Note that you can't have duplicate labels, so if you use labels you'll have to remove the old drive from the system or change those labels before the system will boot). Then all that is left is re-installing grub. If you can figure out the documentation about how to specify that the drive will be moved you can do it now. Otherwise, move the new drive, boot the CD again with 'linux rescue' and if your fstab is correct it will mount the system and suggest a chroot command for making repairs. Do that, then 'grub-install device_name', then 'exit' twice and the system should come up working. Alternatively, if your existing system is installed on LVM (which FC3 would do by default) you could add the new drive as additional space and keep the old one. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
