Help with migration to larger HD

SouperComputer

ive had a google, as you do, but im wonder what the "locals" have to suggest.

I have a soho file server here, running clarkconnect home (V3, based on FC2 IIRC)on a 250Gb HD. partitioned as follows, all ext3:

4gb /
200gb /Network (file share)

For some reason there is no swap partition, but its been running grand for over a year so I dont think ill mess with it!

Anyway, I want to move this onto a 400GB HD as follows:

10Gb /
Remaining /Network (file share)

Ive tried commercial software such as Ghost, True image and Drive image, but AFAIK they have problems with EXT3 under 2.6 kernel?

Any thoughts\suggestions appricated.

TIA

SouperComputer

okay so started DD last night on the 200Gb source partition at midnight last nigh. Its still not done @ 9AM.

I added another IDE controller to help things along, but does it usually take this amount of time to cop 190GB's with DD?

AndrewMc

By default dd copies data 512 bytes at a time. You should get better performance with a larger "block size". Try adding the option bs=16k (or larger, but some websites suggest it doesn't help much more above that anyway) and see if that helps.

SouperComputer

AndrewMc wrote:

By default dd copies data 512 bytes at a time. You should get better performance with a larger "block size". Try adding the option bs=16k (or larger, but some websites suggest it doesn't help much more above that anyway) and see if that helps.

cheers, ive been looking at the directories its creating and I recon its 75% through. Funny, ive been using linux for a long time, but never had to clone a system.

Im assuming DD will copy file privileges etc as well?

AndrewMc

dd just copies data; it doesn't care what the data is. In this case it's a partition with a filesystem, and so the new copy should be identical to the original.

However, this identicalness(?) includes the size of the filesystem - it'll still be 200GB, even if it's on a 390GB partition. You can then run "resize2fs" and by default it'll expand the filesystem to fill the available space. Don't do this while the filesystem is mounted It's also no harm to run an fsck on the newly-expanded filesystem before using it, just to be sure.

SouperComputer

AndrewMc wrote:

dd just copies data; it doesn't care what the data is. In this case it's a partition with a filesystem, and so the new copy should be identical to the original.

However, this identicalness(?) includes the size of the filesystem - it'll still be 200GB, even if it's on a 390GB partition. You can then run "resize2fs" and by default it'll expand the filesystem to fill the available space. Don't do this while the filesystem is mounted It's also no harm to run an fsck on the newly-expanded filesystem before using it, just to be sure.

ah, right I getya. This is a lot more messing around than I thought! 11 hours later im still copying the data, I havent gotten to the OS yet!

SouperComputer

well 26 hours later and it looks like either my FS or HD is borked on the source drive! I wasnt too happy with the sounds so I powered it off.

Ill do an autopsy over the weekend. :mad: