I am planning to upgrade the harddrive on my SuSE box and do not want to re-install teh entire OS. Is there a way that I can move the existing installation to a new drive without losing any data/functionality?

Tx
p.n

I think that you could use dd, dd will produce a bit of bit copy of your old HDD.
after reading man dd, install the new HDD on a diff. cable (secondary) and use the dd comand.

So, just a bit of clarity required here. Would I first need to recreate all the partitions existing on my old drive on the new drive or will dd physically copy the entire HDD?

(The man and info pages pages on dd is not extremely verbose...)

Regards
p.n

OK, I have still not been succesful with this HDD upgrade I need to do. Here is what I have done up till now:

My old (27GB) drive has 6 partitions. I recreated each partition on my new (80GB) drive but increased the size of each partition considerably. I then did the following with each of the partitions:

Obviously * and **are the aproppriate partition numbers.

The order of the partitions are different. Some that were in an extended partion on hda baut is now in primary on hdb and the numbers are also not the same for corresponding partitions. The pration that root is on however is still /dev/hdb1 and I formated it to be bootable.

Next I changed my /etc/fstab file to reflect the changed partitions on the new drive and their corresponding mount points.

After doing this I made hdb1 my master drive and booted up and you guessed it, it did not work. I assume this is cause I probably overwrote the partition table.

Could someone perhaps advise on what the problem could be and how to address it?

Tx
p.n