[techtalk] swtiching rhat drives . . .

[Nils Philippsen]

On Mon, 8 Nov 1999, Jeff Dike wrote:

> > You should be able to create the linux partitions on the 4.5 gig
> > drive, copy the FS from the 9 to the 4.5 (assuming of course, your not
> > using all 9 gig for linux ;), swap drives, boot from floppy (not
> > nescessary?) and run lilo.  You should be set.
> 
> Right.  The copy is a little bit tricky.  Mount the newly-formatted 4.5G drive 
> at /blah or something then try:
> 	tar xpf - `echo * .??* | sed 's/blah//'` | (cd /blah ; tar cpf -)
> 
> This is a standard tar-to-tar copy, except for that sed trickery which 
> prevents tar from grabbing the destination fs and tarring it up.

I always wonder why people use tar beasts if they have the wonderful GNU
cp?

Mounting the new partitions under /blah, /blah/usr, /blah/home etc., this
should do it:

cd /
touch /blah/blah         <--- This is to avoid recursion :-)
cp -av . /blah

You will then see lots of lines (for each file/dir one line) and
occasionally this:

cp: cannot create directory `/blah/./blah': File exists

Lean back and enjoy the show... I think this alternative is far less error
prone, because people have less to type and actually understand what they
do.

> Then go into /blah/etc and edit lilo.conf, and rerun lilo with the
> switch that tells it that /blah should be considered root.
> 
> Then reboot, and you should be all set, except that you might need to tell you 
> BIOS to boot off a different disk.

If you have SCSI, it might suffice to just switch the IDs afterwards, boot
off a floppy and do the LILO stuff then.

Remember: have a boot floppy at hand if you mess with LILO.

Nils
-- 
Nils Philippsen / Vogelsangstrasse 115 / D-70197 Stuttgart / +49.711.6599405
nils at wombat.dialup.fht-esslingen.de / nils at fht-esslingen.de / nils at redhat.de
   The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
   regarded as a criminal offence.                  -- Edsger W. Dijkstra


************
techtalk at linuxchix.org   http://www.linuxchix.org