Hi folks,

I need to transfer the existing hard drive (Debian) to a brand new hard drive of unequal capcity in the same PC.

Old/existing hard - ATA-33, 7G
New hard drive - ATA100, 40G
Motherboard suports, ATA-66 and ATA100
(Remark: the old hard drive works on this motherboard without problem)

I did the same on another PC several years ago with a PARTED boot disk to transfer WinXP to a brand new hard drive. The steps taken were as follows;

1. Attached a new hard drive to Secondary IDE.
(I can't recall whether the brand new hard drive has been formatted or not)

2) Used a PARTED boot disk to boot up the PC

3) Copied the complete hard drive to the new hard drive.

4) Remove the old hard drive and change the new hard drive to Primary IDE. Turn on the PC. That is all.

It is very rapid and easy.

I'm quite sure this process also works on Linux. Unfortunaely I only have a dim recollection on the complete procedure. Can any folk shed me some light. TIA

B.R.
satimis

Hope this helps you

This is how to clone a linux operating system disk to another disk live on a system.



if disk hda has partitions

hda1 /boot 100m

hda2 / 10240m

hda3 swap 1992m

hda4 /var 400m


# mkdir /mnt/boot

# mkdir /mnt/root

# mkdir /mnt/var



# fdisk -l

# fdisk /dev/hdb

Make partitions on hdb same as hda

# mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/boot

# mount /dev/hdb2 /mnt/root

# /dev/hdb3 is swap

# mount /dev/hdb4 /mnt/var



# dump –f - /boot | (cd /mnt/boot; restore –rf -)

# dump –f - / | (cd /mnt/root; restore –rf -)

# dump –f - /var | (cd /mnt/var; restore –rf -)

Hi aaronj,

Tks for your advice.

I hope I understand it correctly
Apply
# df -h
to find the partitions on the old drive (hda)

What is
none 252M 0 252M 0% /dev/shm

Then make following mount points
# mkdir /mnt/boot
# mkdir /mnt/root
# mkdir /mnt/va

The old and new drives are of unequal capacity, old drive 7G and new drive 40G. Can I divid the whole new drive into the same number of partitions as the old drive (hda) but with different size on each partition? Kindly advise. Tks

Is it 2 '--' (hyphens) before f and rf and 1 (one) '-' (hyphen) after rf with a space in between?

I still face any problem about the cable. Old drive ATA-33 uses 40-wire cable but the new drive ATA-100 80-wire cable. 40-wire cable can go into the sock of a ATA-100 drive but a 80-wire cable can't go into the socket of ATA-33 drive because of a blind hole on its plug. I shall use a 40-wire cable connecting the new drive as slave. If it can't be detected then I will connect the new drive to Secondary IDE, removing the burner and CDrom temporily. Because 80-wire cable also can't go into the socket of burner and CDrom respectively.

B.R.
satimis