Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:41:56 -0400 From: nthwaver@gmail.com To: "FreeBSD Questions" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Cloning boot drive - more details Message-ID: <17b33a80604251541h7140866cp46e680404204c61c@mail.gmail.com>
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My system partitions (/, swap, /usr, /var, /home) are currently spread onto a 10GB and a 20GB IDE drive, but I'd like to save space by consolidating these along with some (not heavily accessed) data partitions into a larger 250GB disk. The other drives (at this point a couple of SATA in RAID0) should be unaffected. I'm a relative newbie and although I've read the handbook and the past months' threads regarding cloning, I still have a few questions. 1) Am I correct in understanding that I can simply connect the new drive to a spare IDE controller and boot from the old disk, using sysinstall to make the new partitions and give them temporary mount points (choosing "yes" to install bootmanager), then dump | restore to move each FS, and simply take out the old drives and switch over to the new one? Will this boot and run seamlessly? At what point should I edit the old /etc/fstab that was copied over? If I *can* do this, then what are the benefits of doing a fresh install on the new drive first? 2) If I dump | restore from a *running* system, will the resulting clone be confused when it's booted up? Are any crucial changes or balancing acts made upon shutdown that the new drive will miss? Or, is its main purpose fulfilled when it's loaded into memory on boot? 3) The handbook also recommends using boot0config, but how necessary is this if I just plan on simply replacing the original drive? 4) How are the prospects of data recovery affected by FreeBSD's use of "slices" for filesystems on top of partitions? Experience tells me that with traditional partitions, a corrupted file tree or data in one area needn't prevent retreival of the other areas. Is this so with "slices" as well? Thank you very much, Jordan
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