Cloning hard drive to larger one


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Hey everyone, I just purchased a new and larger (I guess that's a given) hard drive to use. I was wondering how I would go about cloning an exact copy of my current hard drive to have on my newer drive so I don't have to reinstall anything. I know there are tools like Ghost For Linux but I was under the impression that you would likely need that program installed on the drive to use it? I will be using my current drive externally with my external case because the new drive is SATA (so I also need to know how to boot from a USB drive). Any tips would be helpful. If it's rather hard to do, maybe I'll just do a fresh install and copy my home directory as well as any other files I'll need but I'd prefer not to as it would take too long to reconfigure and tweak everything to my liking.

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Maybe have two ways

1. Find ghost dos version and copy it to floppy disk with boot sections. But I don't know this dos version if support sata disk.

2. Use your system now, make your new disk as mirror disk of old, when it finished synchronization, move old disk.

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so you've got linux or windows?
Linux
1. Find ghost dos version and copy it to floppy disk with boot sections. But I don't know this dos version if support sata disk.
I don't think that would work.
2. Use your system now, make your new disk as mirror disk of old, when it finished synchronization, move old disk.
How would I go about that?
cp -av /original/* /destination/
I've done something like this before and it never preserved the permissions. Always have to modify them. Would I have to run that as root?
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I would pick up a copy of Acronis True Migrate Easy. The only issue is you would need a windows PC to install and create a the bootable media. Then you simply boot from the CD and perform the image from the origianl drive to the new one, afterwards disconnect the old drive and replace with the new drive. Acronis automatically can re-size your partitions to the larger drive.

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so you've got linux or windows?

This is the Linux section. You guess now.....

I would pick up a copy of Acronis True Migrate Easy. The only issue is you would need a windows PC to install and create a the bootable media. Then you simply boot from the CD and perform the image from the origianl drive to the new one, afterwards disconnect the old drive and replace with the new drive. Acronis automatically can re-size your partitions to the larger drive.

If it is an image file, like ISO, than one can still burn it to CD under Linux. I've done it several times myself with no problems.

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cp -av /original/* /destination/

It will preserve links and permissions, so it will boot without any problem.

I believe you may want to try cp -pr

-p i preserves the attributes and permissions.

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Since I seem to have a few problems with my current setup anyway (though I'm unsure of it being something in Hardy) I think I might just do the fresh install and copy over what I need.

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I must also agree cp -av should do the trick, or you can do it using tar, http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=35087

Only thing you would have to do after running cp -av /mnt/old/* /mnt/new is the following

mount -o bind /dev /mnt/new/dev
mount -t proc none /mnt/new/proc
chroot /mnt/new /bin/bash
grub-install /dev/sdb

replace sdb with the new hard drive

plus i would recommend copying from a live cd, makes life a tad easier

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What about DD, that will give an exact copy, MBR and all.

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

And wait while it copies everything. Of course changing the device according to the hard drive.

Check first using fdisk

fdisk -l

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  • 1 month later...

I've done this many times with Windows and Linux installed on a drive. With both drives connected to the PC I boot from a parted magic cd and copy the partition I want from the old drive to the new drive and then set the partition I copied to the new drive as active/boot.

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