Backup router, new hard drive.

[Lowell Gilbert]

DanB <longterm at chatusa.com> writes:

> How do I copy the  whole harddrive to a larger drive than the one  being
> copied?
> This is an router that cant go down  for more than a few minutes.  I
> want to replace whole system to the  new  harddirve old one has noisy
> bearings. I have no backup at all.

You can't let the system go down for more than a few minutes, but you
have no backup at all?  First of all, I think you need to work out
your priorities.  Either you're taking this machine too seriously, and
you should just relax, or you should go arrange some backup as your
first step.

If you can afford a second machine to set up the copy on, that would
definitely be a good move.  Then you can make the copy and get it
running at your leisure, with the only downtime being when you swap it
into place.  Failing that, the procedure will be the one in the
FreeBSD FAQ entry titled "How do I move my system over to my huge new disk?"
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#NEW-HUGE-DISK
which basically would mean

 1. take the machine down to put in the new hard disk
 2. bring the machine back up, still booting off the old hard disk
 3. with the machine running its normal tasks, off the old disk,
    partition the new disk, and copy the old disk to it with backup(8)
    and restore(8).  Make sure to partition in the same pattern as the
    old disk.
 4. bring the machine down, remove the old disk, move the new disk so
    that the BIOS will boot from it, and bring the system back up
 5. see if you made any mistakes, and fix them if you did