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

[David Spencer, Internet Handyman]

This was fantastic help. This evening I went for it and got pretty far.
Doing the RAID clone was a wonderful idea - the files copied in about
an hour. I now have a booting system with both the 500GB drives in there
in a RAID 1.

Just one last thing to do. During the RAID merge with the mismatched
drive sizes, mdadm drew down my partition size on the 500GB drive to
create a partition that matched the size of the Linux Raid partition on
the 300GB drive. So, even though I have a working system, I still have
to extend that booted partition to fill the remainder of the free space.
That's for tomorrow - hopefully I'll use the right program and not
have to go back to the start.

Thanks to all who have tried to help,


-- Dave Spencer, PageWeavers

--- Original Message ---

I also figured I'd mentioned that with a mirror it's even easier.  I just did 
this to migrate from 2 250GB disks to 2 500GB disks.

Something along the lines of:
#1 Pull disk B, put it in a safe place in case this goes poorly.
#2 Insert 500 GB disk B
#3 partition disk b
#4 hotraid add
#5 install grub
#6 wait for raid sync
#7 shutdown, put 500 disk B in slot A and new 500GB disk in slot b
#8 partition disk b
#9 hotsync b
#10 install grub
#11 resize2fs and/or lvextend

No need for partition magic, and most importantly if it goes poorly you
have an original disk to use.  Partition magic and friends often work, but I
wouldn't want to try them without a backup.  You have a backup... right?

So there's potentially 3 things to change:
1) Software RAID
2) LVM (pvresize and/or lvextend)
3) Actual filesystem (resize2fs or friends)