system cloning

[Derek]

Warren Block wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, Tony Shadwick wrote:
> 
>> I have a system that we are running in production that there was an 
>> oversight on, and it has a single hard drive installed (32GB SCSI I 
>> believe), rather than a 3 drive raid5 array.  We would like to correct 
>> this, but we have all sorts of up-to-date packages and config files 
>> that we've tweaked that we would hate to just start over on it.
> 
> 
> Surprisingly, nobody mentioned the FAQ entry yet:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#NEW-HUGE-DISK 
> 
> 
> I usually just do a minimal install on the new disk, then restore onto it.
> 

This is totally the way to go for what you want to do.  I've done this 
time and time again without fail.  Provided you can afford enough 
down-time to do the dump procedure.  I would install and configure the 
RAID array, and boot FreeBSD in single-user mode off the old disk. 
(single-user mode may not be necessary because of snapshots, but being a 
database guy, I like to be paranoid about consistancy) Create a slice 
and write the standard boot block to the new array (using sysinstall is 
a snap).  Partition the slice appropriately, with disklabel or 
sysinstall.  Do you dumps.  Then modify your fstab entries on the array. 
  The walkthrough above guides you through most of this.

You'll keep all your wierd filesystem stuff like hard/soft links 
devices, flags, etc...

I've done this going from a single disk to RAID array.  From RAID 1 to 
RAID 5, a single disk to a bigger disk.  It works well, and painlessly 
when you follow that walkthrough.

Cheers,
Derek