On Wed, 5 Oct 2011, Dean E wrote: > Really all you needed to do to switch disks was to: > > 1. boot any linux distro's livecd with all 3 disks installed. (must be an x64 > cd if your previous install was x64 though) > 2. create your raid set (MD? or dm? whatever) > 3. make a matching filesystem on your raid set for each filesystem on your > old disk (sizes do not have to match). > 4. mount each partition, and cp -a /mnt/oldpartition/* /mnt/newpartition > 5. mount /proc and /dev to their relative new location in the new root > 6. chroot into your new root partition. > 7. edit fstab and grub lines to reflect new partition names or GUIDs. don't > forget swap also > 8. reinstall grub/lilo to new raid disks via grub install, dpkg reconfigure > grub, whatever you want. > 9. exit chroot, Shutdown, remove old disk, and fire it up. Machine should be > the same exact machine, just on different HDDs. > > I'm sure I'm missing a step or two but that's the gist of it. > > Based on your post you seem to have the technical skill for it, just not the > knowledge of the boot/grub/kernel/filesystem to think of how to make it work. Thanks. I hope that will work for someone. I can tell that I would have gotten stuck on the fstab and grub editing and grub reinstallation. The other weird thing was that after I got a new motherboard, my old hard drive wouldn't boot anymore. I think I got it to boot after changing some BIOS settings, but then it would not load gnome and I was stuck with the console. I can't say why it didn't work. If I had simply copied it over, it seems likely that it would have continued to fail and I would have had to figure out what was wrong. > Although IMHO the better way to upgrade is to do basically what you did. That makes me feel a little better. I didn't mention it earlier but I have another machine on which I need to upgrade the OS from defunct Ubuntu 9.10 (they don't even support them for two years, except for the LTS releases). I don't want it to be down long because I use it for work. It has a RAID1 in it, but the HDDs are 250GB and I should upgrade to 2TB and increase the RAM. To me it seems like it would be wise to do what I know -- what I just did on my home machine and install Ubuntu 10.10 from scratch. I can do a normal upgrade later to 11.10, if it is any good, but so far I haven't liked what I've seen from 11.04. Or maybe I should try to stick with 10.04 because it is LTS. > Get a list of what programs you want to reinstall, and then "cp -a" your > user home dir from the old setup to the new setup. Then just "chown > youruser: HOMEDIRNAME -R" to get the UID/GID correct. Thanks. I guess I've been using "cp" for more than 20 years but I still didn't know about the -a option. I thought to use rsync because I believed it would do an md5 check on the file transfer. I don't know if cp does anything like that, but maybe it does. Mike