Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 23:39:51 -0400 From: Jesse Sheidlower <jester@panix.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Upgrading HD difficulties Message-ID: <20030926033951.GA9516@panix.com>
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I have been trying for some time to upgrade the HD in my FreeBSD 4.8 laptop, attempting many different things but all with no success. I don't have a separate enclosure for it, and it being a laptop I can only put in one drive at a time. My basic plan has been to back up the current HD to another computer, install the new HD, boot from the Mini CD, use the Fixit shell on the CD to mount the new HD, mount the other computer over NFS, and transfer everything into the newly mounted directory. Originally I tried with dump, but I kept getting loads of errors, so I switched to tar. I made one tarfile of /usr (which is relatively large), and one of everything else. For example: # mount_nfs 192.168.1.2:/OtherComputerHD /mnt2 # newfs /dev/ad0s1 # mount /dev/ad0s1 /mnt # cd /mnt # tar xf /mnt2/original.tar # tar xf /mnt2/original-usr.tar (I actually had to install mount and tar onto the NFS filesystem and run them from there; I'm not showing that here.) I then rebooted, from the new HD this time, rather than the CD, and things started to work OK. But eventually I ran into filesystem problems--sync problems, or other things, and I had to run fsck -y manually to fix them. But though this did clean the filesystem, the stuff that was there wasn't what I had untar'd into place--it seemed to be a bare minimun copy of the OS. This has repeated more than once. I obviously don't know what I'm doing, but would be very grateful for any suggestions for how to get this new HD in. I want it to be exactly the same as the existing one, but with more room; I'm not trying to do anything fancy or switch anything around. Especially by this point I'm willing to do anything to get things working again, as I really need my computer back! Thanks for any ideas. Jesse Sheidlower
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