Copying partition to another partiion

sigma957 · 12-13-2004, 06:17 PM

I have a debian install that I want to move to a larger partition.

One, can I just copy it to the new one, chroot to it, run lilo and have it work?

And if so, what would be the commands to do so?

Thanks!

Barbara

Moloko · 12-13-2004, 07:05 PM

boot in read-only and issue from the top level:
find . -xdev | cpio -pm /mnt

Mount the other partition to /mnt and you can copy everything. If you have the /var on another partition, do the same for this one to the new location.

basileus · 12-14-2004, 03:25 PM

I've moved my /home, /var, etc. on the fly simply by

1) mounting the new partition somewhere
2) copying the files from old partition with "cp -a <source> <destination>" to the new one
3) unmounting old and new partitions
4) mounting the new partition to the old's mountpoint

Of course, you have to update your fstab also, and before everything, if needed, to fdisk and mkfs.ext2.

This method has worked for me several times without problems.

The -a switch in cp means "archive" - preserve file permissions and links.