I am currently running FC2 on my home desktop with a dual boot to winXP. I have the linux partition on a separate hd than my windows partition. My FC2 hd is only 30 GB and my WinXP hd is 80 GB.

I have spent a lot of time getting FC2 just how I want it, now I feel I'm ready to switch permanently to linux and i want to scrap my winXP drive. However, I'm curious if there is a way to copy everything from my FC2 hd to the other hd (thus overwriting winXP) then starting off of the other harddrive.

Is there an easy way to do this? Basically I want to run the root file system off of the bigger drive and use my smaller HD as storage for music and videos. Only thing is I don't want to spent hours re-installing FC2, reinstalling my programs, and re-configuring my desktop environment.

Thanks,

Jacob

- boot with a live cd / recovery disk.

- create the ext3 fs on the windows partition.
- mount both the original and newly created partitions.
- cp -dpR <old mnt pt> <new mnt pt>
- reinstall the bootloader on the new drive (this may not be necessary on grub)
- umount everything and reboot.

that's it.

Great, thanks for the quick reply, here's a few questions I have before I get started doing this...

how can i make a recovery disk? Is there a utility to make one?

How do I create the ext3 fs on the windows partition? Is there where I format it? I want to use the whole disk, not just a partition on this extra disk.

Therefore, if I want to use the whole disk, can I just mount it, format the whole thing (it was in ntfs - can I reformat this from linux)?

then I'll do the cp -dpR <old mount point> <new mount point>
where <old mount point> is my current linux hd and <new mount point> is my old windows (soon to be new linux), correct?

How do I re-install the bootloader on the new drive?

Thanks again, and sorry for the newbie-ish questions, I just don't want to screw anything up here.

Jacob

have a look at Knoppix or for something lightweight: tom's root boot (google for this).

You do it from the recovery disk. use fdisk and mkfs.ext3.

yes.

yes.

depends on what bootloader you're using. for grub:

with the new partition mounted, run:
chroot <new mount pt> /usr/sbin/grub (may be /sbin/grub)

this will put you in the grub "shell",
type
root (hd0) (this may be hd1, depending on how your disks are physically connected)
setup
quit

unmount everything and reboot.

one more question, right now, /dev/hda1 has my boot partition and /dev/hda2 has is my root fs. My new harddrive is currently dectected as /dev/hdb1

Do I need to create a new partition for the boot partition on that drive like a /dev/hdb1 and /dev/hdb2?

Thanks,

Jacob

Yes, you do. You can cp -dpR the boot partition onto the new partition too, as long as your bios can read large drives.