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#1 2011-08-13 02:07:29

Hy Ginsberg
Member
From: Massachusetts
Registered: 2008-08-22
Posts: 74
Website

Disk Cloning Notes

I thought I should record these for posterity, as it seems there are a couple of nuances that the "Disk Cloning" wiki article is missing. 

I just replaced my hard drive with a new, larger one (the old one was starting to make a nasty grinding noise).  I changed some file system types and added a separate /boot partition in the process -- things I'd been meaning to do. 

Following the "Disk Cloning" wiki article advice, I partitioned my new disk with gparted, and used "cp -a" from a LiveCD (Knoppix) to copy the partitions from the old drive to the new one.  I then chroot'ed to the new drive and installed GRUB to the MBR.  So far so good.  (Don't forget to edit /etc/fstab on the new drive.)

I found that Arch would only run under the fallback image.  I am out of my league here, but it seems that having changed the physical drive, I also needed to rebuild the kernel (mkinitcpio -p kernel26), a step not mentioned in the wiki article. 

After rebuilding the kernel, Arch ran under the "normal" (non-"fallback") image as well.  But I couldn't get X started with either image until I did a full system update.  (Probably I should have done the full system update before cloning the disk -- a nice, common sense, idea that I didn't think of until too late.  I don't know if that would have fixed the X problem.)  I don't know why X wouldn't work (sorry, I didn't think to save the log files -- I was just trying to get it working again...), and I don't know what part of updating the system fixed it.  But there it is: X might give you trouble after disk cloning, and a system update might fix it...

Hope that helps someone, someday.

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