nixCraft

I want to upgrade my HDD of 20 GB to 80 GB.
I have a dual boot system with XP ( on FAT32) and SuSE9.3. How do I go about doing the upgrade of the Harddisk without going for a reinstall.

I want to preserve the same slices.....like / ; /home ; /var ; swap. Just that the size of the individual slices will increase.

I know it is possible to dump the entire partition info into a file, in SOLARIS, using prtvtoc.
But is there any such thing in Linux.

How do I go about it.?!!

rc

Well you don't need any special tools.

Use fdisk to parition second disk, and then copy files from first disk to second disk, once you are done then modify grub.conf to point correct partition and reboot system.

1) fdisk /dev/newdisk and reboot
2) Format new parition using mk2fs
3) Mount new partiton and init 1 i.e. single mode
4) Copy data using cp command
5) modify grub/lilo.conf
6) Not sure how to do with windows xp

Here is step by step guide which uses same method: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hard-Disk-Upgrade/

be careful otherwise you could loss the data

if you have more question comment back

Thanks monk,

Well...!!. I do understand that cp will do. But, will it preserve all the user/group rights of a particular file. I doubt that. I think if we copy it using the user root from say /home to /newhome..... the files that are copied to /newhome will have root as the owner.

I may be wrong too. But if what I say is right, how shall we go about it.

rc

Hmm.. Sometime we upgrade or copy client hosting data stored in /wwwroot/a/abc.com to other partition and we use cp -p option which keep the all permission as it is and then we just change config in httpd.conf and other files...
so -p should do a work but never did upgrade hard disk this way. Other choice is to use Linux LVM; We use Logical Volume Management on a Large System where disk requirment keeps increasing day by day. But for that you need to have LVM on first hard drive ... better solution is as pointed by monk, IMPO.

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You can do that with the rsync command like this:

It's a good idea to exclude some dirs, so your rsyn command become:

The command
will do the same, but with rsync you have some advantages like if for some reason you cp command fail you'll have no way to continue where it stopped but will have to start it again, with rsync it will start where it stopped.

disk clone? drive clone? part clone? then resize the cloned stuff?
rsync is complicated IMHO. clonezilla or gparted for GUI kind of click -> select -> cut -> copy -> paste