Arch Linux

Nareto

Member

From: Pisa,Italy

Registered: 2009-07-18

Posts: 148

partitioning hard drive and copying my system back to it

Hello, I need to change my partitions on my laptop and give more room to / and less to /home. I'd like to do it without reinstalling Arch, and also upgrade from ext3 to ext4 in the meanwhile.

I have an external usb hard disk avaible.

What I was thinking is to boot from a live cd, copy all data from my hd to the external one, repartion my hd, and then copy data back to the freshly partiotioned and formatted hd.

What I'm concerned with is the "copy" part... I guess that if I use plain 'cp' my system won't be bootable anymore

Any ideas/suggestions?

thanks,
renato

Ramses de Norre

Member

From: Leuven - Belgium

Registered: 2007-03-27

Posts: 1,289

Re: partitioning hard drive and copying my system back to it

cp is fine, do mind to pass the -a flag to preserve permissions.

thisoldman

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2009-04-25

Posts: 1,172

Re: partitioning hard drive and copying my system back to it

You might want to look at fsarchiver.  I've used it for similar situations.

Nareto

Member

From: Pisa,Italy

Registered: 2009-07-18

Posts: 148

Re: partitioning hard drive and copying my system back to it

and what about /etc/fstab which has uuids? won't these change when I change partitions?

Nareto

Member

From: Pisa,Italy

Registered: 2009-07-18

Posts: 148

Re: partitioning hard drive and copying my system back to it

fsarchiver looks interesting...

thisoldman

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2009-04-25

Posts: 1,172

Re: partitioning hard drive and copying my system back to it

Fsarchiver will restore the UUID and label when it restores a disk, even when restoring to a different filesystem.  It also keeps all file attributes, timestamps, owner, etc.

If you use 'cp -a', I've found it's easy to edit fstab from a live CD or bootable USB stick.

Last edited by thisoldman (2010-11-05 11:42:23)

Nareto

Member

From: Pisa,Italy

Registered: 2009-07-18

Posts: 148

Re: partitioning hard drive and copying my system back to it

great... I think I'll go the fsarchiver way, using this livecd that is recommended on the fsarchiver wiki:

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page