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

[Roman Kyrylych]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 22:20, Will Siddall<will.siddall at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Did you try the tar method?
Also, when you copy files, did you use cp -a?
You can also try partimage which makes copies of partitions.
Doing full byte-to-byte copy of HDD and then doing partition/fs resize
or creating an additional partition in empty space is my preferred method.

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)