Swap Out Hard Drives and move data

[ackray]

I just upgraded the hard drive in my laptop. Installed a new copy of F8 and so far so good.

However when I go to transfer the files from the old drive I have a problem. I placed the laptop drive into a USB hd caddy and the only files that show up in sdb1 /boot are a grub folder, a lost and found folder and about 8 files?

So I can go ahead and replace the drive in the laptop and reboot into my old F8 desktop. From there what do I need to do? Do I create a new partition or folder and move all of my data there? I can go ahead and move everything using a SD card but that is going to take a long time.

[Nokia]

You lost me. You're saying the old drive only shows /boot and lost+found ?

[ackray]

Right.

I plug it into a USB to IDE tray and it now should work like a USB storage drive.

However the only two partitions to show up are grub and Lost & found. It seems as if it's being mounted in the boot directory and I can't get up to a higher level to access my home folder.

[jnvilo]

is there any possibility you have sdb2 and perhaps even sdb3?

[Nokia]

Please post

su -
fdisk -l

[ackray]

This is a new install of today.

bash: fdisk: command not found

[Nokia]

Doesn't matter. You should switch to root first by issuing the first command su -

[ackray]

Thanks,
I did. Trying to see if Konqueror in admin mode makes a difference.

Nope. This is pretty much where I am stuck at:

system:/media/sdb1

[jnvilo]

I find it hard to believe that you don't have fdisk because afaik this is always installed. Anyways it is provided by package, util-linux-ng

so do this as root:

yum install util-linux-ng

and then once that is installed,
once again as user root

fdisk -l


just like nokia said, That will list all the partitions of drives that are recognized by your system.

I suspect that your home is on another partition such as sdb3.


You can also just try to mount sdb2, and sdb3 and see what that gives you. As I said above, it is possible that your root or home is on another partition on that disk.

Also another thing you can do is df -h and see what size is /media/sdb1. If it is way less than the capacity of your drive, then that would confirm that sb2 or sb3 or more partitions exists for your drive and that is where your data exists.

[ackray]

OK,

Looks like I am just seeing the one partition. How do I mount sdb2 on the USB drive? What is being mounted is media/sdb1

[Nokia]

su -
mkdir /media/sdb2
mount /dev/sdb2 /media/sdb2

But i suspect you're skipping steps or not doing things right. Before making anything else, post that fdisk -l output.

[ackray]

Thanks

The commands required a

sed -i s/\$EUID/0/g /etc/profile

in order to work again. So now that I have them working:

[root@localhost ray]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000c33bc

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 25 200781 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 26 19457 156087540 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/dm-0: 157.9 GB, 157907156992 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19197 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/dm-1: 1879 MB, 1879048192 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 228 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x30307800

The 160 gig is my new HD the old one was a hitachi 100 gig. Since that had an f8 on it then my data is probably over on sda2 as well.

[Nokia]

Where did that sed line come from ?

[ackray]

^^^ Nokia, Sorry I am trying to 'fix' two or three things here.

The SED line came from a post I tracked down in reference to commands not working. In my windows experience it means a PATH problem, in Linux I guess it's somewhat similar. So having run that command I can now use my commands again, ifconfig an so on. I'm also trying to find out why my RTL8185 card locks up the laptop after the latest updates.

Anyway to get back on topic

When I try to run that command I get a " mkdir: cannot create directory `/media/sdb2': File exists" error message.

To recap I pulled out my old F8 100 gig HD and put in a faster 160 gig HD. Both should have the same file structure as I simply went with a default install of F8. I'll be putting the old HD back in shortly as I need to get some work done.

Thanks for the help! However if I take a 20 gig HD and put it in the USB to HD caddy what is the best way to partition and format it so I can move my entire home folder over? I could use my XP box but I'd rather learn this now.

[forkbomb]

Originally Posted by ackray

^^^ Nokia, Sorry I am trying to 'fix' two or three things here.

The SED line came from a post I tracked down in reference to commands not working. In my windows experience it means a PATH problem, in Linux I guess it's somewhat similar. So having run that command I can now use my commands again, ifconfig an so on. I'm also trying to find out why my RTL8185 card locks up the laptop after the latest updates.

Commands like fdisk, iwconfig, ifconfig can be run just fine as long as you log in with su - (su space dash)... unless something got messed up. "Su" is not the same as "su -".

If you just use "su" you'll have to give absolute path because you'll still be in the normal user's path (e.g. /sbin/fdisk -l, /sbin/ifconfig, etc) which is why so often you see people advising "su -".