Hard Drive swap

[celticfutballer]

I ran into a problem were I had a 13 gig hard drive running the gnome environment and my hard drive filled up. I tried to remove programs but I'm using a proxy and that add/remove programs requires an internet connection and I can't get it to work through the proxy. I started removing rpms manually, but we all know how that goes with all the dependancies on this and that.

So then I found an old 80 gig drive and thought I'd try to basically copy everything over to the 80 gig drive from the 13 gig. I set up the boot partition and a root partition and used 'star' to copy everything to the new drive. I can boot that drive fine and the login appears, but I can't log in (get an error executing /etc/X11/xinit/Xsession defaults when logging in as root, /usr/bin/xterm 80x24 0,0 when logging in as another user).

The reason I want to use the second drive as the main drive is because I have setup a lot of custom build environments and 1) those things took forever and a day to compile and load and 2) I'll be honest, I haven't figured out how to remap the variable paths for those build environments to use the second drive.

The only thing I've noticed is that the original drive was partitioned using LVM, where the second drive I partition as ext3. So when I mount the system in fstab, I use /dev/hda1 for boot and /dev/hda2 for root, where the old drive uses /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00. Would this cause an error in the login or is there something more that I'm missing here?

I attempted to set up the second drive using LVM but I'm worried that if I do that, it will cause problems having the original drive and the second drive named as the same logical volume. I could give it another name (LogVol01) but then I'm afraid I'd have the some problem at login.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? To summarize, what I want to do is replace the 13 gig drive with the 80 gig drive and have everything work the same way. What about using something like partition magic to actually 'mirror' the old drive to the new drive?

[jbkt23]

I'm not surprised that you could not login to the disk you created using copy all. That method will not preserve ownership or timestamps on critical system files. The directories /proc and /sys should not be copied at all. The "tar" command may be the best tool to copy from one disk to another but someone else will have to explain how. I also notice that you must be using a version of Fedora older than F7 since drives are no longer identified as hda. That won't have a direct bearing on your current problem but it may create problems for you in the future. Sorry I don't have specific help but at least your thread will get bumped to the forefront again.

[Drolli]

If you already have LVM this should not be very hard to achive:
- first create a physical volume with pvcreate on the new disk
- extend the current VolGroup00 with the new disk (vgextend)
- with pvmove you can move data from first to second disk
- with vgreduce you need to remove old disk from VolGroup00

(http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/removeadisk.html)

[celticfutballer]

thanks for the replies.

I did not use the cp command, I used tar to transfer everything. When that didn't work, I used star because I read that tar may not preserve extended attributes. I am using Fedora 6 (i had an intern here do the install for me, not sure why he chose 6). I was aware that i shouldn't copy proc and sys along with certain things under dev (don't remember which off the top of my head).

You mentioned something about time stamps and owner ship, does tar (or star) preserve those? I suppose I'll check that out, that would be an issue I think.

As for the LVM, that makes me feel better using that method described by drolli. I'll give that a try this afternoon and hopefully it will work and everything will be wonderful.

[sidebrnz]

My suggestion is to nuke the new drive and start over. This time, use clonezilla from http://clonezilla.org/ to clone your old hard drive over onto your new one and expand the file system to fit.