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#1 2010-05-19 15:38:12

king.flasher.dave
Member
From: Berlin
Registered: 2008-11-25
Posts: 140
Website

[SOLVED] Copy Arch installation to new harddrive with Win

Hi fellas,

Someone might have already done it, and maybe even this post (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=92528) is very close to what I want to do, but still to be sure:

I want to buy a new (bigger) harddrive for my laptop which currently is running Arch besides Windooze Vista (brr, I know, but that's about to change).
So for working reasons I'll have to install Windooze (7 most likely) again (and first to not mess up the mbr afterwards... we know that game... :> ) and after that I want to get my current Arch installation working again (by copying the root dir over to a partition on the new harddrive).

How exactly would I do that (make it run again afterwards)?
The above topic already mentions the following steps for making this sort of thing happen:

cp -a contents of root-dir to external hd.
Boot live-cd and cp -a from external hd to /dev/sd(where you want your root system to placed).
Reinstall grub.
Mount /devsd(rootfilesystemplacement) to somewhere.
Adjust fstab and menu.lst according to setup - reboot and cross fingers.

Maybe someone has done this sort of thing before and can give me some insights.
Do I also have to follow this directive as well?

Before rebooting I believe you should do a 'mkinitcpio -p kernel26' otherwise the modules you may need to boot will be missing (I guess the fallback image would still work though).

Thanks in advance for any help!

I will have some time to fumble around with it... but in the end it would be nice to not waste too much on it wink

Last edited by king.flasher.dave (2010-08-12 14:04:34)


Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you'll ever regret.

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#2 2010-05-19 16:26:25

geniuz
Member
Registered: 2010-04-10
Posts: 127

Re: [SOLVED] Copy Arch installation to new harddrive with Win

I think the following describes your intentions best: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Disk_cloning

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#3 2010-05-19 20:57:05

some-guy94
Member
Registered: 2009-08-15
Posts: 360

Re: [SOLVED] Copy Arch installation to new harddrive with Win

king.flasher.dave wrote:

Hi fellas,

Someone might have already done it, and maybe even this post (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=92528) is very close to what I want to do, but still to be sure:

I want to buy a new (bigger) harddrive for my laptop which currently is running Arch besides Windooze Vista (brr, I know, but that's about to change).
So for working reasons I'll have to install Windooze (7 most likely) again (and first to not mess up the mbr afterwards... we know that game... :> ) and after that I want to get my current Arch installation working again (by copying the root dir over to a partition on the new harddrive).

How exactly would I do that (make it run again afterwards)?
The above topic already mentions the following steps for making this sort of thing happen:

cp -a contents of root-dir to external hd.
Boot live-cd and cp -a from external hd to /dev/sd(where you want your root system to placed).
Reinstall grub.
Mount /devsd(rootfilesystemplacement) to somewhere.
Adjust fstab and menu.lst according to setup - reboot and cross fingers.

Maybe someone has done this sort of thing before and can give me some insights.
Do I also have to follow this directive as well?

Before rebooting I believe you should do a 'mkinitcpio -p kernel26' otherwise the modules you may need to boot will be missing (I guess the fallback image would still work though).

Thanks in advance for any help!

I will have some time to fumble around with it... but in the end it would be nice to not waste too much on it wink

That should work, I ended up doing something similar when I moved my / and /boot to my ssd.

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#4 2010-05-19 23:13:44

mikesd
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-02-01
Posts: 788
Website

Re: [SOLVED] Copy Arch installation to new harddrive with Win

king.flasher.dave wrote:

Before rebooting I believe you should do a 'mkinitcpio -p kernel26' otherwise the modules you may need to boot will be missing (I guess the fallback image would still work though).

Thanks in advance for any help!

You shouldn't need to if all you are doing is swapping hard drives. You would if you were going to switch to raid or lvm during the process. If this is the first time you have transferred a system this way and you stick to a similar disk layout to the original setup you shouldn't have too many issues.

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#5 2010-05-19 23:29:12

kazuo
Member
From: São Paulo/Brazil
Registered: 2008-03-18
Posts: 413
Website

Re: [SOLVED] Copy Arch installation to new harddrive with Win

king.flasher.dave wrote:

cp -a contents of root-dir to external hd.

A point about this. Make sure that the external hd have a good filesystem for using 'cp -a' (for example a fat32 is no good). You can use tar (but dont compress) to do the backup (possible using split too, to, dohh, split the huge tar file =]). I remember I did this one time and worked, but I had problems with sparse files so look for the correct tar options.

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#6 2010-05-20 00:49:21

lilsirecho
Veteran
Registered: 2003-10-24
Posts: 5,000

Re: [SOLVED] Copy Arch installation to new harddrive with Win

Suggest the post title be changed to include the windows requirement.

I have generated an archlinux transfer to a larger drive several
times but only archlinux...no windows.

This is done very simply with dd command.

After the transfer, the new drive can be modified as needed with gparted.


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#7 2010-08-12 14:19:00

king.flasher.dave
Member
From: Berlin
Registered: 2008-11-25
Posts: 140
Website

Re: [SOLVED] Copy Arch installation to new harddrive with Win

Okay fellas, here's what I did:

First I installed Windows 7 on the new harddrive and also made a Data partition (like used on the harddrive before).
So basically (not speaking of the changed UUID... will get to that later) my setup did not change very much, except that I have a bigger disk now smile

Booted with Arch LiveCD and made the ext4 partition I used to have for /.
Then I copied all the contents of my former / to the new partition. For this I used cp (following this wiki (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dis … g#Using_cp), thanks to geniuz for the link!), which absolutely suited my needs (in this case).
NOTE on the wiki entry: You'll have to use

cp -a /mnt/source/* /mnt/destination 

instead of just

cp -a /mnt/source /mnt/destination 

because otherwise it would create the folder source in the destination folder. Which of course is not what you want wink

After that I reinstalled grub to the MBR by first identifying its root (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRU … stallation), which of course now was on the new harddrive and then installing it to the MBR (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRU … to_the_MBR).

I still had to do some fixing because of the UUIDs used in /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/UUID#by-uuid) as they had changed due to the new harddrive. You can also use /dev/sdX, but I had completely forgotten about ever using the UUIDs wink

My setup now (same as before, but differing sizes):
/dev/sda1 = Windows 7
/dev/sda2 = Data stuff
/dev/sda3 = Arch /
/dev/sda4 = swap

Hope anyone will find this helpful. The wikis concerning this topic are very good btw. only stating some minor typos/bugs wink

Last edited by king.flasher.dave (2010-08-17 13:11:15)


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