Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
My laptop running Fedora 7 had a 100G SATA drive. I went out yesterday and
purchased a 320G drive.
First I used dd to transfer my entire existing drive to the new drive, it
worked perfectly - I'm typing this on my system via the new drive now.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I have to ask why did you do
this? It would presumably have been easier to a) format your new
drive and then b) copy all your files to it (using cp, tar, cpio,
rsync or whatever). I can't see how copying via dd makes any sense
in this context.
if (and i stress, *if*) dd works, i'm guessing it's going to be *much*
faster since it's working at the raw device level rather than having
to go through the filesystem layer. personally, i'd probably waste
the extra time with a filesystem-level tool but, if it worked for the
OP, i'll bet it took a lot less time.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil". He's only doing it
once, so dd being faster is (within reason) irrelevant. And now he has
to waste a lot of time asking the list how to expand his partition
(useful knowledge I'll admit, but still), *and* wait for some tool to
actually do it.
It's a trade-off though. Dd copies the old stuff too precisely,
preserving the old size. The file oriented tools (tar/cpio/cp) don't
copy precisely enough so instead he would be wondering about filesystem
labels, boot loaders, and probably SELinux re-labeling before he could
get the new copy to run. At least he is running now.
on the downside, since the newer drive was much larger, i'm guessing
he managed to make 220G of new disk space inaccessible (unless he did
something clever he didn't tell us about).
Exactly. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".
Isn't this precisely the reason that the system defaults to installing
on LVM now? The old-school way would have been to create a new
partition and filesystem in the new space and mount it as /home or
something. I thought the point of LVM was that you could grow it - and
then the filesystem(s) it contains more or less non-destructively.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
