topic Re: clone a small HDD to a bigger one in Operating System - Linux

clone a small HDD to a bigger one

'chris' — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:41:27 GMT

hi

I'm looking for a tool to clone a small HDD with Linux Ext3 to a bigger one and resize partitions.

Re: clone a small HDD to a bigger one

MaNU ESCaR — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:27:59 GMT

Hi,

have a look at this one : GParted

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php

Really great tool ...

hope it help,

Regards

Re: clone a small HDD to a bigger one

'chris' — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:20:05 GMT

Thx, but have U already tried to resize with GParted without losing data?

Re: clone a small HDD to a bigger one

MaNU ESCaR — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:59:47 GMT

I don't remember doing it with an ext2/3 filesystem as I don't see the need for it :

if you have a bigger disk available, why don't you partition the new disk with right size partitions and copy the content of the old partitions in the new/larger ones ???

There may be something better but i've cloned hundreds of (ext2/3, reiser ...) mixed partitions with something like :

# ( cd /mnt/src/ && tar c . ) | ( cd /mnt/dst/ && tar xv . )

where /mnt/src/ is old partition/filesystem and /mnt/dst/ is new one.

It works great with multiple destination partitions like :

/dev/sdb1 on /mnt/dst/ and
/dev/sdb2 on /mnt/dst/usr and
/dev/sdb3 on /mnt/dst/home and ...

mounting multiple partitions that way you clone your system in 1 time, and easilly change one partition from ext2 to xfs and another one from ext3 to ext4 ...

Concerning mbr, I use to chroot in the newly cloned filesystem and use my distro's native systemtools to re-install it (I generally use Suse and use grub-install)

Hope it helped