[plug] Moving Running System to new HDD

[Ian Kent]

On Wed, 2006-12-06 at 23:18 +0900, Patrick Coleman wrote:
> On 12/6/06, Timothy White <weirdit at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have a system that I need to move to a new HDD.
> <snip>
> > What do people recommend as the best way to do this? Is it possible to
> > do while the system is live?
> 
> I realise it's not much help to you right now, but it might be a good
> idea to put LVM on the new drive so its easier to do this in future.
> Under LVM, you can install a new drive, migrate / to it, and remove
> the old drive in about four commands, and all without ever taking the
> system down (assuming you can hotswap hdds). Very neat stuff.

Absolutely, LVM2 is a must these days.
And if you don't have the hardware Linux software RAID performs well.

You do need to spend a bit of time to understand LVM though.
I shrank my root disk the other day and made the logical volume one
extent too small (smaller that the contained file system). So you need
to understand the physical allocations and know which utilities put out
the information you need when resizing.

Ian