Replacing Drive with SSD

[Warren Block]

On Tue, 15 Sep 2015, Doug Hardie wrote:

> After spending a lot of time reading through the various responses, I 
> decided to use a larger SSD and use dump/restore to move the data. 
> However, I encountered an interesting problem which I do not have a 
> solution for at this time.  The system will only boot a memstick 
> image.  That works fine.  I formatted the new SSD and got it all 
> setup.  However, none of the current systems have enough space to do a 
> dump on.  I needed to dump from the existing machine over to the new 
> one with the SSD.  The only thing running on the SSD machine is the 
> live file system.  Dump uses rsh/rcmd which need some files set in 
> /root.  Unfortunately that is mounted as read only as its a memstick 
> image.  I can’t see how to easily get dump to dump to a remote system 
> when you can’t get rsh/rcmd to login.

The live filesystem from an installer will work, although mfsBSD is 
nicer.

Pipe the output from dump into an ssh session on the remote machine that 
runs restore.  Leaving out most of the options for clarity:

dump -f - | ssh user at remote 'cd /target && restore -rf -'

If a dump file is desired, it can be created on the SSD filesystem:
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/backup.html#_code_dump_code_via_ssh

That file can be restored directly on that system.  Since the SSD has 
essentially zero access time, it does not hurt like restoring a dumpfile 
on the same drive.