I'm trying to migrate from one server to another. I was going to try backing up the hd using dd, but there's a problem.

My old server has one main partition (/) and a swap partition. But I did the RIGHT thing on my new server and put /boot, /home, /usr and /var on their own partitions.

What's the best way to migrate from the old server to the new one?

Since you are changing your partitioning scheme, you won't be able to use dd, at least not without moving things around afterward. I would think your best bet would be to use cp or rsync. If you are copying across a network you could use rcp or scp in place of cp. (rcp is not recommended unless your network is completely trustworthy.)

After copying everything, you will need to install the boot loader on the the new machine. (Simply copying the MBR won't work.) You can do this by booting from a live CD. If you are using GRUB, you can issue the GRUB commands directly. If you are using LILO, you should first mount your / on a temporary mount point and mount your /boot partition normally, and then chroot into your temporary mount point and run lilo. With LILO, make sure you don't mount the root of your new file system nodev.

Great answer - I would simply add that if you chose to use cp, do it as "cp -a ..."

And likewise for rsync. AND ... (now that you reminded me!) neither scp nor rcp should be used because (TMK) there is no option for those to handle symlinks properly.

BTW syg00, your sig is really good. I'd use it in my own sig if "borrowing" wasn't such poor form!

Thanks for both of those suggestions. So one final question:

Let's say I use cp -a. Is there anything I SHOULDN'T copy from the old system to the new one? Since the hardware is different, I wouldn't want to copy anything that would mess that up.

Should I leave /boot alone, since it already works? Or should I copy everything from the old system to the new one, then boot from a live CD?

Thanks a mill for your help.

All of the copying should be done from a liveCD - mitigates having to worry about the pseudo filesystems; principally /dev and /proc.
Goes without saying the source server should be shut down first.

Copy the appropriate entire tree to each new partition - then fix the bootloader. I like to do it from the new /boot, but probably not strictly necessary; can be done from the code base on the liveCD.