smaller drive to larger drive duplication mystery

midlifecrisis · 01-18-2006, 11:38 AM

Hello everyone. I've spent several hours looking for instructions on how to transfer my old Solaris 8 36gb scsi hard drive image to my new 73gb scsi hard drive, but with little success due to my ignorance of Solaris. The most that I can find is that I need to backup my 36gb drive with ufsdump, start a fresh install on my 73gb drive -making the appropriate slices, then dump the tape backup from the 36gb to the 73gb. Does that sound right?

Finlay · 01-18-2006, 12:30 PM

install both drives
setup the partitions on the new drive
boot with a live cd, mount the old drive and the new drive.
use dd to copy everything over into the proper partitions.
then chroot to the new drive edit fstab if needed.
run your boot loader.
shutdown, take out the old drive.

you may need to rerun the boot loader and edit the fstab after the old drive is removed.

midlifecrisis · 01-18-2006, 01:26 PM

Finlay,
when you say to "setup the partitions on the new drive", do you mean to use fdisk? Do I use dd -one partition at a time or copy the entire contents of the 36 to the 73?

Finlay · 01-18-2006, 01:38 PM

i would use fdisk to setup the partitions, then use dd partition at time, remember to do the mbr that way also. here is a page that has some info:
http://www.rajeevnet.com/hacks_hints...s_cloning.html

midlifecrisis · 01-18-2006, 02:15 PM

Thanks Finlay, between what you've told me and the link -I should be able to clone the drive.

javier.e.menendez · 02-01-2006, 05:43 AM

One thing about ufsdump though... If you are using that method to back up and restore on the larger drive, ufsdump does not back up the bootblock. If running a sparc system, you would have to run the command installboot to manually add it to the second drive. dd will copy the bootblock though, but I have never tried dd with two different types (size) drives.

installboot is not in your path by the way. Usually you use this as you are booted from the cd (ie: boot cdrom -s)

midlifecrisis · 02-01-2006, 07:23 AM

Thanks javier. Actually I decided last week that the duplication idea was a bit over my head, so I let it go.