Transferring system to a new hard drive

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2004-11-05 09:13, CHris Rich <freebsdnews at gmail.com> wrote:
> My original install of FreeBSD is on a 30 gig hard drive, I want to
> move it to an 80 gig I now have, but i don't want to have to reinstall
> everything since I've spent hours waiting for some ports to install.
>
> So after googling and searching I found a few ideas of how to migrate
> to a new hard drive but none which I really trust, (ghosting,
> acronis(sp?))

You can do it using standard tools, provided with the base system.

I recently moved all my data to a new 200 GB IDE disk, and kept a set of
step-by-step notes while doing this.  They are available online at my
weblog, if that's any help while you plan your own migration to a larger
hard disk:

http://keramida.serverhive.com/weblog/archives/daemonizing-a-new-disk

> If I do move it over will I have ot make new slices to take advantage
> of the bigger hard drive? If this is the case will I lose what data is
> already in the slice or can it adjust without any hitches or loss of
> data?

I made new slices to the larger disk, installed a clean copy of FreeBSD
using 'make installworld' and then moved all my user data to the new
/home partition.

You don't *have* to move everything.  But it's a nice chance to clean up
things if you have been upgrading from the sources during the past X
years, like I had been doing.

- Giorgos