Moving my current install to a bigger hard drive
 

Hi everyone

I want to install a bigger hard drive in my laptop and was wondering
if Ubuntu has a utility to move the install from one hard drive to
a different one. Im using Hardy Heron. I know windows has a utility
to do this but have not heard of one for Ubuntu.

I do have an external hard drive enclosure that I can put my new drive
into to copy my current install to if it is possible.

The reason Im interested in just copying my drive instead of just doing
a fresh install is I have everything working great, and to be honest, I
dont remember all the add-ons I installed to get it that way.

Do you think I should just go start over and do the fresh install?

My laptop is an IBM T40, 1.4ghz, 2 gig ram, with a 60 gig hard drive.
my new drive is 120 gig.

Thanks in advance

Vanessa

I do this all the time first you need grub installed on your machine mbr. so last night I moved one system to another now a big thing I do is I never have a separate partition for home but it is ok if you do. just create a partition and point your fstab to it. so I booted up my pupplyinux in to ram and copied all the files from the sdb1 to sda2 then it took a long time. now after that I opened the /etc/fstab file and changed toand you have to do the same thing if you change your swap location. here is the kicker you have windows running and if you where booting with grub it mapped your system to see the old place. so you may have to reinstall grub or remap. I do not have this problem because windows is gone for ever since 1998. but you may need to down load super grub in case it goes bad it will get you booted into your system so you can run grubconf. but if you can boot from the drive then just copy the system over with a live system like puppy linux why not use windows it for works different f.a.t.'s why a live system and you will be unable to copy your /dev/folder over and other running programs.if booted in that system. now go back and boot your old ubuntu and run grub and tell it to put the files on that drive and to put the boot loader on that drives MBR. in the old days we would create a partion the same size .this made a mirror image of your drive. and if you had three partition on your those went along. This is a very powerful tool and not for the newbi

Thanks Drakeo

Ill try it this weekend. I think your last statement is where Im at though.

"This is a very powerful tool and not for the newbi"

the whole process sounds like it is over my head for now, but I will try it.

I was hoping for a one or two clicks kind of thing in a software package.

Thanks again for the quick and detailed response.

Vanessa

You could also grab something like the clonezilla live CD, and clone the partitions from one drive to the other..
http://clonezilla.org/
http://www.linux.com/feature/115208

hey farslayer is clonzeilla doinng mirror image or is it doing copy over why running in ram. as you know mirror images do that to the other hard drive any way you deserve a thanks. Because I want to go play with clonezilla to see what it is doing. ccoool

Clonezilla has multiple modes it can run in.. worst case scenario is that it falls back to dd. Better case scenario is that it copies just the data from the partition to an image. then you can write that data back to a partition that is a different size. copying jsut the data is obviously faster than copying an entire partition including the slack space with dd..

I recently had to clone a Dell Laptop due to a failing hard drive and was able to clone both the utility partition and the Windows NTFS partition to images on an external USB HD, then restore the images to the new Hard drive after it was replaced.. all using the clonezilla Live CD. Took a few tries to figure out the proper options, but it worked very well.

think of clonezilla as being similar to ghost.


another option is G4L ghost for linux
http://bhavesh.freeshell.org/cloninghd.html