transferring darta to another drive

paul62 · 04-04-2005, 10:34 AM

I have another drive setup as a slave on my system and I would like to transfer the whole operatinsystem to the other disk, what would be the easiest way to accomplish this I am using slackware 10.0.

Matir · 04-04-2005, 10:43 AM

The easiest way to do this is to use either rsync or plain cp to copy the files. Just format and mount the secondary hard drive appropriately, and perform a copy. You might want to exclude /dev, /proc, and/or /sys, as needed for your system.

egag · 04-04-2005, 10:43 AM

a simple method is :
( supposed hda1 = source & hdb1 = destination )

#dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1

make sure your destination partition is equal or larger than the source partition.

egag

Matir · 04-04-2005, 10:45 AM

The dd method also works well, though it will copy "empty" space (on a 100 GB partition, if only 20 GB are used, it will copy all 100 GB). It also becomes inconvenient when the partitions are of different sizes (the filesystem will be the old size) and when the system is on multiple partitions.

Nobber · 04-04-2005, 10:46 AM

Assuming you want to copy just the root partition and run Slackware from the slave drive, you could boot up a "live" distro from CD - e.g. Knoppix, mount your source partition (read-only) on /mnt/slack1, your target partition (read-write) on /mnt/slack2, and then do:

cp -a /mnt/slack1/* /mnt/slack2

After that you would want to modify /mnt/slack2/etc/fstab to reflect the new filesystem locations, add an option to boot the kernel from the slave drive to your bootloader config, and reboot.

egag · 04-04-2005, 10:50 AM

yip, but dd will take care of symlinks also.
and as i said, if the dest>=source it'll be ok.

and if it's spread over more partitions, you need to do the same for the other partitions.
but it's not meant to shrink a partition.

egag

paul62 · 04-04-2005, 12:39 PM

Ok I got it working I would appreciate it if anyone can tell me if there is any way I can run programs off o this disk from console, without actually booting into it.?