Moving existing FreeBSD system to a new harddisk...

[illoai at gmail.com]

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!
>

Dan's process seems fairly sound, from having
done this myself.  I use pax(1)* on the filesystems
rather than tar(1) on the archives, and I tend to
only backup /home, /etc, /var (especially /var/db/pkg),
and /root.  If you do not make some dreadful error
your old drive is the backup, at least until you can
confirm the state of the new drive.


*cd / && pax -r -w -p e -X ./ /mnt && \
pax -r -w -p e -X ./var /mnt && etc etc
for /usr /home and any other mountpoints
(if I recall correctly. Note that with pax the -X
flag is important in this case so it is not trying
to copy /mnt into /mnt/mnt and into /mnt/mnt/mnt
and so on)

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