Moving existing FreeBSD system to a new harddisk...

[Christian Walther]

On 18/04/07, Amarendra Godbole <amarendra.godbole at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have FreeBSD 6.2 installed on a Dell Latitude D400 laptop. The
> harddisk is 40G, with FreeBSD occupying about 25G, and remaining to
> Windows. I have received a replacement for this hard disk, which is a
> bigger capacity one - 80G. I have to move the existing FreeBSD system
> from the old to the new hard disk. I did find something here:
> http://www.freebsddiary.org/driveswap.php. Still, I'd like to hear
> someone's experience regarding the same. Thanks!

I recently replaced a dying Hard Disk with a newer and bigger one. To
move the data to the new disk I used dump/restore, and stored the data
on my server.
1. dumped all slices from the machine to the server
2. replaced the disks
3. did a basic FreeBSD install from CD ROM to get a proper disk layout
and a boot manager. Because of this installation I got the same slices
as on the old disk, just with a new size matching the new disks
specification. So the slice names remained the same.
4. restored the previously dumped slices to the new disk

BTW: As long as you don't remove/destroy the data on the original disk
there's nothing desastrous that can be happen to you. If the method
you choose doesn't work somehow, you can still create another backup
of the original disk.
>From all possible and existing methods you should choose the one you
feel most comfortable with, e.g. that you understand completely, and
where you know the needed tools most.