[arch-general] how to migrate installs between hard drives?

[Will Siddall]

Hey everyone,
After several attempts, I'm still back to trying to resolve this.  To
explain in more detail, I had a 100G hd with a root partition (with my
Arch Install), a data partition and a swap.  I managed to run dd on
both partitions and in the new hd (200G) apply both.  But that only
worked partially due to the fact that it copied the ratios of file
sizes rather than the actual file size... Copying 80G of data from a
30G partition doesn't quite sit well with me.
Next step was to mount the iso images and copy the files.  That's what
I was in the process of doing of my last message and it worked...
until I went to restart and update.  What I found that was that my
permissions and ownership info was not kept.  Because of this, as soon
as I went to update anything, the installers would run, but just
delete the files (it deleted pacman and yaourt so I had to find a way
to compile pacman to install again... until it tried to update all of
my bin tools... then everything was gone).
Now following all of your suggestions, I tried rsync -arpol and a
variety of different other settings but it still doesn't keep the
permissions.  I tried running tar on the partition, still not working.

Does anyone have any other suggestions or know why I'm having this
problem?  I'm going to try to wipe out the new hard drive and run dd
on the whole 100g disk and reapply it to the 200G disk.  And by the
way, I'm running a ubuntu livecd to run these processes.

Thanks,
Will

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 1:10 PM, David Rosenstrauch<darose at darose.net> wrote:
> solsTiCe d'Hiver wrote:
>>
>> if think dd is the worst way to copy data between disk or partition
>>
>> i used to copy data from one partition to another the "old" way by using
>> tar and a pipe
>>
>> tar -C /myfirst partition -csSf -|tar -C /mysecondpartition -xSsp
>>
>> rsync is not bad too.
>
> I also prefer to handle this type of things using tar, though without the
> pipe.  I generally will generate a full tar archive of the original
> partition, then copy it over to the other disk and either fully untar it, or
> untar portions of it.  The reason I go for the full archive is because I
> like to keep the tarball around afterwards in case I need to repeat the
> process, need to untar additional portions of it, etc.
>
> DR
>