changing hard disks

[Paul Richards]

--On Friday, October 19, 2001 09:35:45 +0100 Simon Griffiths
<simon.g at claycrossbs.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: freebsd-users-admin at uk.freebsd.org
>> Sent: 18 October 2001 22:24
>> Subject: changing hard disks
>> 
>> 
>> Hello,
>> 	I'm getting a 40Gb disk in a few days to replace a 1.6Gb
>> disk as Primary
>> Slave. At the moment I'm running BSD and windows both from the
>> master disk,
>> and my intention is to put BSD onto the new one. Can I do this without
>> reinstalling? And how do I go about it?
>> 	Cheers,
>> 	Ben
> 
> I was having a think about this last night and I reckon the best (?) way
> to do this would be to install FreeBSD onto the new drive, then mount
> your old hdd and copy all your data across.  The other way I guess would
> be to use a system like Norton ghost but I'm not too sure how this works,
> maybe dd could do it also.
> 
> Sorry I've not no firm answers but maybe one of the suggestions above will
> help,

dd is no good because it does a low level copy, What you'll end up with is
a 1.6Gb disk image overlayed across the front of your 40GB disk, which
almost certainly isn't what you want.

You need to partition your 40GB disk first.

I'd suggest using sysinstall to partition the 40GB drive. I'd recommend you
disconnect your current drive, boot off an install CD and then do the
partitioning. I *don't* recommend leaving your current drive connected when
you do this because unless you're very careful sysinstall will wipe it for
you.

Then use dump/restore to move the files from your old disk to your new disk.

Paul Richards
FreeBSD Services Ltd
http://www.freebsd-services.com