Date: Sat, 28 Sep 96 00:12:21 PST From: BRETT_GLASS@infoworld.com To: hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Migration to larger hard disk: How? Message-ID: <9608288439.AA843935686@ccgate.infoworld.com>
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I need to migrate the files of a production FreeBSD 2.1.0-R system from a half-gig IDE hard disk to a 2.5-gig IDE hard disk. I have not tried this before, and would like to (as much as possible) get the procedure right the first time. First off, I need to know the best way to avoid trouble with the large (>4095 cylinder) IDE drive. (Before anyone says it: yes, I agree that IDE is an abomination, but in this case I must proceed with this drive.) How should I set the CMOS? (The BIOS *seems* to have support for disks with large numbers of cylinders, though it only allows a maximum of 16 heads and 63 sectors.) Once I've configured the BIOS to understand the drive's geometry, should I start with the new drive as the slave? Or as the master (with the older drive as the slave)? Next, I need to know how to prepare the drive. When I installed FreeBSD originally, I just walked through the menus presented by the boot diskette. But since FreeBSD's sysinstall utility doesn't seem to work on a system which is already running, how do I find and execute the proper utilities to partition the drive and create filesystems on it? How should I allocate space between the paritions on the new drive? Currently, there are four: root, swap, /usr, and /var. /home is symlinked to /var/home. Should I continue to do things this way, or break /home out into its own partition? Finally, how do I copy everything (including links) to the new drive? How do I temporarily mount the partitions on both the old and new drives and copy the data? How do I then set the mount points so that, when I remove the old drive and make the new one the master, the system boots as before? Can I mount the old drive read-only to avoid any chance of corruption? Since users will be depending on the machine, and we can't have TOO much downtime, I'd like to outline a complete plan before I start and be able to back out of the procedure painlessly if it fails. What do folks out there -- the experts -- recommend? --Brett
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