I have a new hard drive about 150% larger than the current one. I have both Vista and Ubuntu on the current drive, along with a shared partition to allow me to move data to and from.

When I first partitioned the original drive, I used only 10GB for the Linux root partition, and now I have plenty of room and want to grow it on the new drive. Since the inode table is part of the partition (I believe,) I don't think that I can just dd the old partition over to the new one.

What do you think I can do to solve my problem?

Thanks,
Steve

You may also want to look into using clonezilla to clone the old hard drive to the new hard drive:
http://www.clonezilla.org/
There is a clonezilla live CD available:
http://www.clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/

I finally had a chance to d/l clonezilla and use it to move things around. Unfortunately, what I was afraid would happen, did happen.

Here is the fdisk output after the use of clonezilla and then moving the drive into my laptop and booting:

Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xef859dce

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 12004 96421763 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 12004 13309 10482748 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda3 13310 14224 7349737+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4 14225 30401 129941752+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 14225 14617 3156741 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 14618 18534 31463271 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 18535 22451 31463271 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 22452 26368 31463271 7 HPFS/NTFS

I cloned the first partition and the third (the OEM Vista install) and thought that my cloning of the second partition (10Gb originally, and I set up the new drive to have 30 Gb. After creating the various new partitions, Linux, MSDOS and VFAT, I wrote the partition table, then figured that it wouldn't hurt to mkfs all of the new partitions.

I'm surprised that partitions 2, 3 and 6 don't seem to reflect what I set up. Here is the df output:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6 10412484 9767044 116504 99% /
udev 1026060 284 1025776 1% /dev
none 1026060 376 1025684 1% /dev/shm
none 1026060 336 1025724 1% /var/run
none 1026060 0 1026060 0% /var/lock
none 1026060 0 1026060 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sda2 1044480 1024820 19660 99% /media/NewVolume
/dev/mmcblk0p1 7899664 2181500 5718164 28% /media/8GB2
/dev/sda8 31447888 16 31447872 1% /media/holding

sda6 OUGHT to be 30Gb, sda2 OUGHT to be 3 GB.

I used clonezilla thinking that it could move the contents of a smaller partition to a larger one, and would have used dd, except I thought that the inode table would transfer over and cause the same symptoms as I am seeing.

Can anyone see what I am overlooking?

Steve

Let's see what parted thinks

Here 'tis:

(parted) print
Model: ATA WDC WD2500BEVT-1 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 250GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 98.7GB 98.7GB primary ntfs boot
2 98.7GB 109GB 10.7GB primary fat32 lba
3 109GB 117GB 7526MB primary ntfs
4 117GB 250GB 133GB extended
5 117GB 120GB 3233MB logical
6 120GB 152GB 32.2GB logical ext3
7 152GB 185GB 32.2GB logical ext3
8 185GB 217GB 32.2GB logical fat32
9 217GB 249GB 32.2GB logical ext2

(parted) check 9
Warning: Partition 2 is 10.7GB, but the file system is 1074MB.
Ignore/Cancel? i
Warning: Partition 3 is 7526MB, but the file system is 7337MB.
Ignore/Cancel? i
Warning: Partition 6 is 32.2GB, but the file system is 10.8GB.
Ignore/Cancel? i
Information: The ext2 file system passed a basic check.

Steve

Just found this again - is it still an issue ?.

Eventually,I stumbled into a solution, but I'd be damned if I can remember exactly how I solved it.

I THINK that I created the larger partitions, formatted them, then rsync'ed everything into them. The Vista partition wouldn't boot, and having an HP with only a "remake the original, as-sold, OS DVD", I was stumped as to how to fix it. But I eventually found a Vista restore disk via Google, downloaded it, and I'm now (as of last night) in a much larger "home".

Steve