When I first installed my Redhat 7.1, I only had two 1.2 gb Harddrive. Because all the packaged I wanted, I was forced to install my Linux on 2 harddrives, where one drive consist only /usr directory, another hd consist of rest of the Linux(300mb) AND 128mb Linux swap files (rest of HD are my windoz partition).

Recently, I managed to steal/beg for an old harddrive from my friend who is not using it. It has whole 4gb !!! What I want is to move my current Linux into one HD (a lot more versitle... just in case I one day want to move to another machine).

I used fdisk to partition the disk, and I also use mkfs and mkswap to make the file system and swap. I can temperary mount the new HD to something like /newHD

NOW... i am stuck.

I tempted just copy everything from my main linux partition (300mb) to the new HD. Then I was warned that it is a lot more complicated than that, especially the /proc directory.

Question 1:
Can I just do

tar clpf - / | (cd /newHD; tar xpvf-)

at the root and dont worry about it?

Question 2:
What other precaution should I take (those similiar to /proc directory)?

Question 3:
After I am done, besides /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf, what other file I need to modify in order to use the partition?

Thanks in advance

Harv

1. Uhm, whats against doing "cp -a"?
2. Just rm -rf /proc on the new disk, then "mkdir /proc", it's a virtual representation and fills itself when the system goes live. Check your kernel for inclusion of all modules if the new HD isn't in the same class as the old one. If you don't want to muck with your current kernel's root device parameters (man rdev), you just swap the new for the old disks position. There's no other precautions I could think of except for running fsck with the -f flag to be sure.
3. Make sure you bootcd/disk works, you'll need it to install LILO if you didn't use LILO's chroot (LILO -r) already: test your new config with "/sbin/lilo -r /newdisk -t -v".

Good luck

The Hard disk upgrade Mini How-to is what your looking for.