Adding hard drives - OpenSUSE Linux 10
 

I have been using a system for about 3 years now. The configurations and are all set and Kernel runs great.
I would like to know the correct sequence of events that one would use when upgrading to larger hard drives. At this time there are 2 physical HD's 250 gigabytes each that are really full>(df says >93%) I have purchased 2 new 500GB drives to replace these others. I would like to keep the exact config happening here , just with larger drives.

These are not RAIDed at this time and I would like to incorporate the old drives as file space in the new configuration as well.

Is it best to just image these drives (250's to the 500's) with like rsync or maybe even use acronis in a windows machine to image? There may be perms issues?

I could find no one doing this already or any info in the manuals for this task, curiously.

Thank You, all help appreciated.

Hi,

You could use a LiveCD and 'dd if=/dev/your_HDD of=/dev/your_new_HDD bs=4096'. You would have to have the HDD(s) installed on the proper channel and setup either as 'CS' or Master/Slave.

You can look at 'Learn The DD Command Revised' to get some useful information.

This link and others are available from 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!

I have used acronis to backup a Laptop Hard Drive with OpenSuse 10.3 and then recovered to a bigger HD (from 6G to 10G) with no problems.
I know its not much Info, but hope it helps.
If you have a program to backup the drives, give it a shot and just keep the old drives as a complete backup till you know that everything works on the new ones (I have a Box of about 20 old HD's that were upgraded, but never wiped so I have a backup. most of the drives are old 10Gig ones with Windows 98 on them. :tisk: )

Thanks for the info.

I think I'll try acronis since I have used this with success before. But, in an NTFS partition.

Please post if anyone knows any potentiality for things going awry with this!?!?

No problem if you Image the disks since it will be File system independent although you will need a target to store the disk image of course since this needs to be read at RESTORE time.

Note that while doing this process you will need to have at least 2 separate Hard disks available since you can't Image a disk partition to itself.

For temporary storage a USB external hard drive can be very useful here. If you use decent compression in the Disk Imaging program (Acronis is good at this) you should find the image will be from 40% - 75% less than the USED space (not the actual Allocated space as acronis won't copy empty sectors by default). The Stand alone version of Acronis True Image will pick up externally attached hard disks so you can restore from usb drives.

What I would do is use the STAND ALONE BOOTABLE version of the acronis program. If you have it installed on Windoze just make bootable media.
Boot from the CD/DVD you created.

Backup your partitions - use reasonably high compression to avoid wasting too much space whilst storing the target partitions).

On restore you can resize the partitions.

BTW if you are reasonably wealthy Blu-Ray writable DVD's are a decent way to go -- up to 50GB per DVD.


This is the only place it could go pearshaped --assuming the RESTORE's are not corrupted - is that the order / number of partitions could change.

In this case don't panic as you won't lose data or have to re-install your Linux system.

Just boot your Install Linux CD / DVD and select REPAIR system.

The Repair option appears AFTER the INSTALL so choose that first.

You can then fiddle around with fstab to ensure the / and other system partitions are mounted to their correct partitions and then correct the other fstab entries. For example you might find Old system / is mounted on /dev/sda2. After restore it could physically exist on /dev/sda5 for example so your fstab will be incorrect and the system won't boot.
After repair it will be fine

In any case you'll have to do a "repair system" as GRUB - the boot loader will have to be re-created because the physical disc geometry will have changed by you re-sizing the partitions on your bigger discs.

This is fixed also in the Repair system option.

You should then have a complete clone of your old system.

Cheers

-K

adding hard drives
 

Just to make sure... Are you referring to the linux version of acronis?

I have backed up dual boot hard drives with multiple partitions, but since this is just ext* file system my windows machine (the one with acronis) does not even see the drives in order to image them.
It seemed to have worked before because there was an NTFS file sytem on one of the partitions on the disk and therefore picked the linux partitions while imaging..


I have tried extractig the HD's from my linux machine and connected as USB externally to image them. No success.

I thought of using diskparted then but I can not risk doing something wrong on this system!

I remain searching for the best solution...

I ran acronis on a (desktop)computer running Windows XP, Imaged a Laptop Hard Drive with Win2Kpro and OpenSuse 10.3 on it. less then a month later changed the Hard Drive for bigger one. when I ran the backup I had no problems.

Yes, this was my point. I've never had a any troubles at all myself doing this same thing. But, what about with no windows partitions at all on this drive? I am running only Linux with all ext3 partitions. In this scenario my table and hard drive are not being seen at all by the windows install that I have acronis on.

If I image I have to do all drives at once, since I can't risk losing these partitions...
:Pengy:
thanks