Anyway, I wanted to say I found another proof of how great linux is. BIOS recognized only 8 GB, but linux (or parted, I wouldn't know which one gets the credits for this) corrected this fault of my ancient BIOS and my ancient laptop and automatically set things right
I thought this is impossible without a bios upgrade. Other not free (although a bit old) partitioning software I have could not do that, they all reported a 8 GB disk.
I had some troubles with nfs, though. It was painfully slow and when I wanted to abort copying I couldn't kill cp. I noticed this problem with other programs when using nfs some time ago. Looks like this very annoying bug (or is it a feature ) is still present. I don't see why any process besides init should have this immunity.
Funny thing is, when I swithed the roles of nfs client and nfs server, I got properly high LAN speeds and the system transfer finished successfully
]]>That mistake with the wilcard is really funny, thanks for pointing it out, I hope I'll remember not to make it myself although it's probably quick to repair, just move files to /
]]>Remember when you copy back to designate a wildcard, for example as in:
cp -a /mnt/backup/* /mnt/fresh
Otherwise your root fs will end up under "/backup" ... (I actually made this mistake once, lol.)
Also, you can go from ext3 to reiser with no problems.
When you're done the system should just boot as always.
]]>It's basically a tar.bz2 of you whole filesystem, excluding things like /proc, /sys, /tmp, etc...
tar -cvjpf /whatever.tar.bz2 / --exclude=/proc --exclude=/sys etc...
mico wrote:So probably I could simply copy everything, but correct me if I'm wrong. I will however check /proc to be sure it's empty.
IIRC I just used the third method from the howto (specify each top level directory to be copied) :-)
I mentioned the dirs above because when I forgot to exclude /sys cp segfaulted while copying it (but I was doing it in single user mode from one hd to another attached to the second ide).
The howto pretty much explains everything that is needed. I only had to figure out myself how to install grub (I did chroot to mounted directory with new hd root dir, run grub, setup root, find stage1 file - In my case with separate boot partition I had to shorten the path by removing boot, run setup). I'll leave an url here just for the record:
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual … ively.htmlBTW Beeing able to just copy all files from one place to another to upgrade hardrive is one of the best things in linux 8)
You can do that with windows too ;-)
]]>So probably I could simply copy everything, but correct me if I'm wrong. I will however check /proc to be sure it's empty.
IIRC I just used the third method from the howto (specify each top level directory to be copied) :-)
I mentioned the dirs above because when I forgot to exclude /sys cp segfaulted while copying it (but I was doing it in single user mode from one hd to another attached to the second ide).
The howto pretty much explains everything that is needed. I only had to figure out myself how to install grub (I did chroot to mounted directory with new hd root dir, run grub, setup root, find stage1 file - In my case with separate boot partition I had to shorten the path by removing boot, run setup). I'll leave an url here just for the record:
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual … ively.html
BTW Beeing able to just copy all files from one place to another to upgrade hardrive is one of the best things in linux 8)
]]>You sholdn't copy everything (like /proc /sys /tmp).
That's why I plan to boot knoppix on laptop on both nfs mounts. I think this way /proc will be empty (?), /tmp and all other dirs will be in state of a stopped system, whatever that may be. I'm running debian with static /dev on that laptop, so /sys is empty anyway. So probably I could simply copy everything, but correct me if I'm wrong. I will however check /proc to be sure it's empty.
]]>1. boot knoppix on laptop, set up nfs server, set no_root_squash in /etc/exports
2. nfs mount on my workstation as root
3. cp -a /mnt/nfs-laptop /laptop-files
4. replace disk on laptop, create partitions, again boot knoppix on laptop
5. mkreiserfs /dev/hda1
6. do the same with nfs, only this time laptop (knoppix) is nfs client
7. cp -a /mnt/nfs-workstation where-hda1-is-mounted
8. chroot where-hda1-is-mounted
9. run lilo
Will this work and everything will be the same as before? The kernel, packages, all settings, database entries, ... I think it should be, but I've never done this before so I'd rather ask before buying another disk (even used laptop disks are not so cheap here).
One more thing: now I have ext3 filesystem on laptop. If I copy the system to a reiserfs partition, could that cause any problems?
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