- When Is It Time to Change?
- My Mistakes
- Dealing with the Cable Issue
- Installing the New Drives
- The Transfer from IDE to SATA
- Making a Backup
- Wrap It Up
The Transfer from IDE to SATA
There are several possible ways to do this—and dd is not one of them, because an exact copy from a 160GB drive to a 400GB drive is a guarantee of trouble.
The method I picked was to do a minimal installation of Debian Etch using the installation CD with the LVM option for the filesystem. Then I copied the original installation back from the former main IDE drive via rsync. (Using LVM is not really recommended; it was a legacy from the original FC6 installation I never got around to doing anything about.) LVM-specific steps should be ignored by non-LVM users.
Here are the steps:
- Do a minimal install of Debian Etch. If you don't have the final version of Etch, download and burn it.
- Boot the system from Knoppix with the old and new primary drives plugged in. Since I had an IDE mobile rack in the original setup, I delayed its removal so I could simply put the main drive where the backup was and then plug it into the rack.
- Mount LVM volumes. Mount drives.
Note the designation of the new SATA drive on the LiveCD desktop. If the configuration drive names don't match what's given below, change them so that they do. hdd is the original mobile rack backup drive, and sda is the new main drive. Of course, your drive partitioning may vary according to distro defaults or based on changes you have made to the default install.
Non-LVM users should change /dev/terrarium/root to /dev/hdd5 and /dev/sda5 (or to drive designations that fit your specific setup) before using the commands below.
# su # mount /dev/terrarium/root /media/hdd5 # mount /dev/terrarium/root /media/sda5 # mount /dev/hda /media/hda1 # mount /dev/sda1 /media/sda1 # rsync -aHlv --progress /media/hda1/ /media/sda1 # rsync -aHlv --progress /media/hdd5/ /media/sda5
Note that changing the LVM UUID is not necessary until the new backup SATA drive is installed.
- Make these configuration changes:
For /sda1/boot/grub, change system.map drive entry to sda.
For /etc/fstab, change hda1 to sda1, and change hda5 to sda5 (or to whatever matches your filesystem):
/dev/hda1 /bootto
/dev/sda1 /boot
- If you have an LVM filesystem, no other changes are necessary. If you have a regular filesystem, change the / entry from /dev/hda5 to /dev/sda5 (or whatever makes sense for your setup).
- Shut down, remove the Knoppix LiveCD, and reboot. (Knoppix automatically unmounts drives during shutdown.)
- Is everything OK? Reboot again to make sure that it is.
You're done, until you're ready to make a backup.