[vox-tech] I'm over my head - need a cookbook for transfering system to new disks

[Brian Lavender]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 01:56:28PM -0700, David Spencer, Internet Handyman wrote:
> I'm hoping that somebody can help me by directing me to a step-by-step
> cookbook of some sort for what I'm trying to do. Here's the summary:
> 
> We've got a Dell SC1425 1U server. The system has dual 300GB SATA drives
> that I've configured in a software RAID 1. It's running CentOS 4.5 and
> is pretty much up to date. We've also got Plesk installed on it and
> it's purpose to exist is to host websites.
> 
> We recently got this idea to replace the 300GB drives with 500GB drives.
> My programmer and I thought that the best way to accomplish this would
> be to use Linux Ghost to copy the contents of the drives. So we pulled
> one of the 300's and replaced it with the 500. Then we ghosted the 300
> to the 500. Next we replaced the 300 with the other 500 and used ghost
> again to copy the data on the first 500 to the second. We rebooted the
> system and it worked! Well, almost.
> 
> The problem was that Linux Ghost did a fantastic job of duplicating
> the exact dimensions of the 300 drives onto the 500. So we had a system
> with partitions that were only 300GB in size. Obviously we wanted to
> take advantage of all that extra space. And that's where things went
> terribly wrong.
> 
> We've tried a number of things from using Linux Ghost to expand the
> partition to using fdisk and dd to redefine the partitions and then
> copy the data from one of the 300's using an external USB 2.0 drive.
> Nothing works. Where did we go wrong?
> 

Hey, check out this article I found. I appears to have the details.
http://fedoranews.org/mediawiki/index.php/Expanding_Linux_Partitions_with_LVM

If you use lvm, you can add to the logical volume and then you can use
ext2online to expand the file system.


<--------- ext3 -------------->
<----- LV -------------------->
<---- 300 Gig---><---200Gig --> Two Physical volumes here
<--------- disk 0 ------------>
<--------- disk 1 ------------>


Also, Here's a howto with Xen. In Xen, you often need to chop up the drive for
the virtual machines. 

http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/linux_virtualization/xen_3.0_user_guide/linux_virualization_xen_user_44.html

brian
-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/