Hi all-
Newbie here... I installed pclinuxos2009 to a new partition on my primary hard drive. WinXP is installed on the drive too. I had a smaller drive that I used to backup my media files in windows, but I bought a new hard drive which is the same size as the original (the one with windows) that I'm now going to use as a backup. I'd like to then use my old backup drive as my linux drive.
Is there anyway to easily copy my linux partition (/ and /swap) to the 2nd drive (I can use the entire drive if I want) without reinstalling? I would rather avoid reinstalling because I spent several hours configuring and setting up stuff with pclinuxos that wasn't originally working (wireless networking, video card, sound etc). I'm sure I could manage to just copy all the files, but I don't know how to reconfigure the bootloader (grub).
Hopefully that wasn't too confusing. Although I'm pretty new to installing and configuring linux, I'm pretty comfortable using the linux cli, so if the easiest way is to use cli programs, then I'm ok with that.
The copying is easy using rsync. I've given detailed instructions on the forum many times. The same goes for the grub edits, which sometimes are in the same thread with the rsync instructions.
Click the
SEARCH button following
HOME and
HELP buttons at the top of the page, enter
rsync under
Search for: and
old-polack under
by user:. Then click the
Search button at the bottom.
For each hit,
middle click the header
directly above the quoted area,
before the by old-polack part. This will open the thread, at that particular reply, in a separate tab, so you don't lose your place in the
Search Results tab.
Scan the entire thread for the relevant parts on the ones that seem to have long detailed instructions.
This one should give most of what you need. You'll have to make allowances for
your partitions having
different designations, but the method is simple and complete.
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,60675.msg489237.html#msg489237You might also want to consider
labeling your new partitions, as labels are much easier to understand than UUID numbers, but work the same way, as long as each partitions label is
unique. If you are dealing with existing
ext3 formatted partitions, as root you can add a label with;
[root@localhost ~]# tune2fs -L <whatever> /dev/<whatever> <Enter>
You can also label a
swap partition, while it's
unmounted, using the
mkswap command;
[root@localhost ~]# mkswap -L swap1000 /dev/sdc2 <Enter>
That's the actual command I used for the swap partition on my 1 TB drive. I use the hard drive size (in GB) to identify each swap partition.
[root@littleboy ~]# blkid |grep swap/dev/sdb2: LABEL="
swap160" UUID="b69ed243-1225-4fc2-be9f-6637c9108391" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sdc2: LABEL="
swap1000" UUID="584a1d5d-668d-4435-8a90-589283eb3e8b" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sde2: LABEL="
swap750" UUID="0ccd09b0-ebb4-4f78-8c73-632232adf438" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sda2: LABEL="
swap200" UUID="438b91c3-6812-40b2-a267-d177415042c5" TYPE="swap"
In your new copy of menu.lst where the
UUID of the copied OS shows up in each stanza, you would replace it with
root=LABEL=<whatever>, and in the fstab of the copy, the / partition entry would start with;
LABEL=<whatever> / ext3 defaults 1 1Examples:From my public beta release
menu.lst stanza;
title Pbeta-1
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz BOOT_IMAGE=Pbeta-1 root=LABEL=pbeta1 resume=LABEL=swap1000 splash=verbose vga=791
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.imgMy
fstab;
# Entry for /dev/sdc14 :
LABEL=pbeta1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=TR5-Documents /home/polack/Documents ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=Documents2 /home/polack/Documents2 ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=share7 /share7 ext3 rw,user,noauto,exec 0 0
LABEL=share9 /share9 ext3 rw,user,auto,exec 0 0
LABEL=movies /movies ext3 rw,user,auto,exec 0 0
LABEL=movies2 /movies2 ext3 rw,user,auto,exec 0 0
LABEL=TV-1 /tv ext3 rw,user,noauto,exec 0 0
LABEL=storage00 /zstorage00 ext3 rw,user,noauto,exec 0 0
LABEL=120backup /zbackup ext3 rw,user,noauto,exec 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/sda2 :
#LABEL=swap200 swap swap defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/sdc2 :
LABEL=swap1000 swap swap defaults 0 0
# Entry for /dev/sde2 :
LABEL=swap750 swap swap defaults 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto rw,user,noauto,exec 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/dvd /mnt/dvd auto ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/sr1 /mnt/dvd auto ro,user,noauto 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0