Upgrading HD difficulties

[Lowell Gilbert]

Jesse Sheidlower <jester at panix.com> writes:

> Originally I tried with dump, but I kept getting loads of
> errors, so I switched to tar. I made one tarfile of /usr
> (which is relatively large), and one of everything else.

There might have been a hint in the errors you were getting with
dump.  

Note that you can't make a copy of a whole system with tar, because
there are several kinds of special files it won't handle well.          

> (I actually had to install mount and tar onto the NFS 
> filesystem and run them from there; I'm not showing that
> here.)

They should've been on the fixit disk you booted from.

> I then rebooted, from the new HD this time, rather than
> the CD, and things started to work OK. But eventually I
> ran into filesystem problems--sync problems, or other 
> things, and I had to run fsck -y manually to fix them. But
> though this did clean the filesystem, the stuff that was
> there wasn't what I had untar'd into place--it seemed to
> be a bare minimun copy of the OS. This has repeated more
> than once.

You didn't mention ever doing a minimum install.  However, you *must*
have done at some point.

> I obviously don't know what I'm doing, but would be very
> grateful for any suggestions for how to get this new HD
> in. I want it to be exactly the same as the existing one,
> but with more room; I'm not trying to do anything fancy
> or switch anything around. Especially by this point I'm
> willing to do anything to get things working again, as
> I really need my computer back!

I recommend doing a clean install, and then restoring the original
disk's contents to a separate subdirectory tree, to move the user data
in from.  I would even do a new install of your ports/packages, using
the restored data to rebuild the configuration information.