Arch Linux

nogoma

Member

From: Cranston, RI

Registered: 2006-03-01

Posts: 217

Migrating root file systems

I've googled around for this a bit, and searched the forums, but haven't quite found what I thought was a good guide for migrating my root filesystem. I've about decided I want to get off reiserfs; move over to ext3 (with the idea of upgrading ext4 later, I suppose). Is there a simple howto on accomplishing this? I run my system on top of LVM, so it's no big deal to create a new logical volume for the new root; I guess I'm just looking for the cp or tar incantation that will copy the appropriate data over, and avoid copying stuff like /dev that I don't imagine should be copied...

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-nogoma
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Code Happy, Code Ruby!
http://www.last.fm/user/nogoma/

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: Migrating root file systems

I have an exclude file containing (remove home, add boot, depending on your partition scheme):

/tmp/*
/home/*
/sys/*
/proc/*
/dev/*

Just tar it up with "-X exclude_file" and untar in a new place.

gradgrind

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2005-10-06

Posts: 921

Re: Migrating root file systems

I think this sort of thing might be safer using a live cd, then you don't have to worry about these special directories. Just 'cp -a'. So far as I know you still need a few entries in /dev (which this method will preserve), and don't forget to adjust grub and /etc/fstab.

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larch: http://larch.berlios.de