[plug] upgrading hard drive

[Leon Brooks]

On Sun, 9 Jun 2002 10:56, Jon L. Miller wrote:
> Sorry meant to mention that the 10G is being removed due to faults on
> the drive.

Hokay, my advice is:

* use a 40G drive instead, the difference in cost is circa $20

* partition up the new drive for better security. my rule of thumb is:
  /boot 20MB (mount this ro when done)
  /tmp 200MB (ext3,nosuid,nodev)
  swap RAMx2
  / 250MB (ext3)
  /usr 3G for kitchen sink, maybe 500MB minimalish (ro)
  /var min 500MB (ext3,nosuid,nodev)  \__ share out your space here
  /home min 500MB (ext3,nosuid,nodev) /   depending on the system's purpose

  qmail is bizarrely laid out and will object to the mount options for /var
  which is one reason I avoid it (-:

* unless the config is exceedingly complex, do a fresh install of a
  current distro on it, boot from that, and install any updates

* mount the old drive somewhere and copy the necessary config and data/user
  files across piecemeal. postgresql will require that a dump be done on
  the running old system and executed against the new unless the first two
  version numbers are the same, and even then it's a good idea.

* if that sounds too hard, remember that work saved here will cost you
  later in some way.

* if you still want to do this

  * make a boot floppy
  * partition and mount the new drive on /newdrive
  * cp -ax / /newdrive
  * cp -ax /boot/* /newdrive/boot/
  * reboot with the floppy
  * lilo

Cheers; Leon