upgrade HDD

[Micah Lieske]

Scott wrote:
> I have a FBSD 4.10 install on a machine that the HDD has become full. 
> I would like to replace the drive with a larger one so does anyone
> know any howtos on how to do a disk to disk transfer?
> 
> I've down this with Linux before... copied the partitions over in
> single user mode and reinstalled the boot manager although I suspect
> there's some differences with FBSD as I've never replaced a disk on it
> before.
> 
> Many thanks,
> 
> Scott.

I see while I was typing this someone posted a FreeBSD howto.

My simple procedure was to:

* Make sure you have an install CD handy with the live filesystem, just 
in case you screw something up. :)
* Make the slices and partitions on the new drive using sysinstall.
* Mount them somewhere one at a time (say mount /dev/ad???? /mnt/newroot)
* Use rsync to copy the files over to the new partition (in ports under 
net/rsync).  I used rsync -avx src/ dst (man rsync for details).  Other 
tools can be used too.  I copied a linux installation once using plain 
old cp.
* Adjust the fstab entries on the new partition to point to the new 
drive.  If you remove the old drive you /may/ not need to do this.
* Possibly reinstall the boot manager.  Can't help you on FreeBSD's boot 
manager because I use grub.  I think sysinstall will ask about 
installing it when you do the slices/partitions.

HTH,
Micah