I am not much different, which is why I suggested this. You would still need to download clonezilla though.

step by step is a little hard right now but I am sure you could get a long way:

- check that both filesystems (source and target) are the same, you initially said you had your current 80gb drive formatted as ext2. is your source drive ext2 or ext3 (8.10 uses ext3 as default / fs i think)
- question: do you have external storage big enough to hold a maximium of 40gb?

if you do then use that later for writing your clone image to temporary.

if you don't then use gparted live to partition your 80gb drive into two 40gb partitions, the first one being equal or slightly larger then the source (to overcome issues you would get if it were too small). the second partition to whatever is left for temporary writing the clone image to (which is compressed so it should fit).

- having both your hd still in your system, boot with clonezilla live cd, I use this version.
- it is very self explanatory generally all default settings remain untouched and I keep hitting the enter key until it asks me where it is going to read/write from/to and wants to mount that as a temporary 'home' partition. in case you do not have external storage you would choose sdb2 for this.
- there is an other instance where it asks what to do: because I always work with partitions I would choose there to 'save a partition' (even in your case I still would).
- I think it then prompts and suggests a name, which you could leave the way it is or give it your name to it and make it look like this: SomeName-280509-img , it is important that it ends with '-img'.

sinds it is not really a step-by-step guide there may be a few steps left out just know that the defaults are good when it becomes too technical.

- after the clone is saved to sdb2 shut down your system remove (disconnect) sda and make sdb sda by either jumpering its setting from slave to master
or
in case of cable select (cs) connecting it to the connector your original 40gb was connected to.
or
in case of SATA drives connect the 80gb drive to where the 40gb drive was connected

- boot your system with clonezilla into the clonezilla program
- select sda2 to mount as your 'home' for read/write images from/to
- pick the one and only file on that partition as your source
- use sda1 as your destination

if all went well then you should be able to boot into your system
if so, then after you determined that it was successful you can use gparted live cd to resize your new / partition by deleting sda2 first (the one where you temporary stored the clone image file) and then resize sda1 to max capacity of the drive.

if it all failed, you have lost nothing.

good luck.

wabbalee, thanks for your prompt and informative reply.

Im getting pretty near the end of my rope and will probably just format and reinstall Linux. I tried the download for clonezilla...almost 4.5 hoours at 56k...much too long without access to Wifi or DSL.

Both drives formated as ext3
NO external storage bigger than 4 gig flashdrive or CDROM

I will wait a bit and see if I can get a copy of clonezilla installed and try your idea. Thanks again, your reply was very helpful.

just for the sake of clarity

it is a live cd; you run this of cd not hd, therefore no installation is needed.

let us know how you went.

wabbalee

yes, will use ISO image file. Thanks again

Enough is enough. I will be formatting the 80 gig drive and reinstalling Ubuntu 8.10. This is just getting too frustartting and time consuming. I thought this would be an easy problem to solve, but as I am quickly learning, NOTHING is easy in Linux.

Thanks to all who tried to help, this will be my last post on this topic.

Well that's a pity, I was trying to help teach you how to catch the fish...

I agree with wabbalee on the clonezilla - it can duplicate every block like dd, adds the advantage of compression, and can resize partitions to better use the new disk.

Our group supports 2000+ systems, and we have tried fsarchiver, partimage, mondo/mindi, g4l, and simply documenting well enough to repeat a build from scratch. If you have compatible hardware (Latest Dell and HP systems usually covered within a year), clonezilla does very well.

Hope this helps,
Dave

Not sure why you resurected an older thread. But I just use tar and mkfs and the usual tools. I've used G4L too, usable, but the archives aren't much use outside of G4L. tar makes a compressed image of the contents of the drive. The downside is that tar doesn't make the partitions or filesystem on the new drive. And all of that other stuff. The advantage is that when you untar on a fresh filesystem, you get rid of a lot of the fragmentation that might have otherwise existed. Not that that is as deterimental to performance as Fat32 is to Win95 and friends in linux.

1) boot a LiveCD (with both drives installed)
2) partition NEW drive.
3) mkfs the desired partition on the NEW drive.
4) Mount the NEW drive.
5) Mount the OLD drive.
6) cd to the OLD drive mount point.
7) tar -cjvpf /path/to/new/mount/point/backup_YYYYMMDD.tar.bz2 ./*
(less j, plus z, or however you want your compression or not / manage time+space)
8) cd the NEW drive mount point.
9) tar -xjvpf ./backup_YYYYMMDD.tar.bz2
10) change fstab to reflect the NEW location (if you don't intend to remove the old drive just yet).
11) reboot (if using grub use it to manually boot the new system)
12) once booted to the new system install / re-install grub so that it resides on the new drive/partition.
13) reboot once more to verify all is well in your universe.
14) if you don't need the tar / backup, remove it. You've got double the space, so it's not like it's hurting anything.

Caveats. Make sure that fstab reflects the new system. Make sure you have a means to boot the NEW system. And don't screw up the order of parameters on tar or you could accidentally delete your archive(s). Beyond that it really is that simple when it comes to linux. One other caveat, if you intend to change your hardware configuration, make sure the other changes reflect the destination system. At a minimum always keep a liveCD around AND a grub boot CD. With just those two things you can do almost anything. To include installing windows on a completely blank HDD. Seagates come formated with 00's for everything to include the MBR. Since windows requires you to reboot without an MBR before you can fix your MBR, a grub boot CD can compensate for windows idiocy.

G4L could simplify this for you, but you might need to keep the same partition sizes. And it probably doesn't optimize / defrag / whatever the NEW filesystem. Yes it takes a tad longer to go this route. And some base knowledge. But it's not really THAT technical of a process per say. I tend to do this process often. It ensures that all data bits of your OS were written recently so if there's any sort of memory fade for old data never touched, you avoid it. And the process itself involves making a viable and recent backup. The old system remains untouched, so you can always go back to ground zero (until hardware failure).

cp -a might also work, but I've heard varying theories of hard links and other things that don't work well that route. I had an odd mozilla problem going the cp route too. Some sort of CPU race condition that didn't exist on any other machine or install by any other method. So tar for me. If I'm in a hurry, I'll avoid most compression and just -cvpf. Computers and drives are fast enough these days that it's not a days process. A small enough install and 30 minutes might be pushing it if you know what you're doing.

Hi Team, I have a wish to multiply my Puppylinux (Slack-like, root) clone.

Background and intention
-------------------------

My Puppy on a USB stick is now made with a Combo-Boot method found in a wizard within Puppy 431. Shortly explained, it makes a vfat sda1 with no boot flag, wrapping a sort of vfat sda4* *=WITH a boot flag, both primary as CFdisk indicated and yet sda4* unseen by Gparted, ... editable from mountable desktop icon.

What I allegedly gain is hopefully to boot every BIOS combination around as wizard promised (well, eh..hmm , so far just USB-HDD) but also since all Puppy files are meantime placed automatically by wizard at sda4* - I do have a clean workable sda1 seen from Ms' and a minimized potential of risk from innocent users towards unlucky system files (+ maintennance advantage of live edit of syslinux on sda4* --> unmount and reboot without error, as long as system files placed on other partitions, but that is AFAIK exclusive for Puppians).

Now, this method enforces me to fulfill the whole 2G flash area with vfat sd(4*)1, where I personally need only 1G the most, but also need a seperated ext4 sda2 for the system. I cannot resize sda(4*)1 via Gparted to create such. It errors me.

So I thought to myself: maybe I simply copy it to another blank flashdisk, a bigger sdY, say 4G, there it stays bootable 2G sdY(4*)1 and I build next to it a 2G ext4 on rest of flash for my system uses (so syslinux & vmlinuz,initrd etc' on sdY4*, the system itself at sdY2, sdY1 empty for data).

What do I need actually ?
--------------------------

1. All I wrote last paragraph needs some assistant commands.

2. Can I do '1' above in a way I can zip it (the whole 4G bootable sdY(4*)1 + sdY2) into a zip, send it to your mobile SD, for instance, you unzip it there to have a bootable system from mobile in a simplicity of a clip ...

In my POV both 1 and 2 need some head/sector recheck/refresh command.

I think some knowledge on this forum should be re-polished a bit. I think we're close.

Thanks in advance, Timmo'.