[Mageia-discuss] Copying system to new disk

[Frank Griffin]

On 11/14/2011 03:37 AM, Juergen Harms wrote:
> The hard drive containing my system partitions is dying. I can still 
> read it, but will have to rapidly replace it by a new (and bigger) drive.
>
> Does somebody have experience with - rather re-installing Mga and 
> Windows-7 partition - simply copying the corresponding file-system 
> (piped tar) and then just recreating the boot sector - would be much 
> quicker, in particular for the windows partition? Any particular 
> precautions to take?
>
For Mageia, I would just dd the old partition to a new one of the same 
size on the new drive.  IIRC, all you need to adjust is the partition 
IDs and numbers in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/{menu.lst,install.sh}.  
Allocate the new partition by hand or using expert mode of diskdrake to 
have *exactly* the same number of filesystem blocks as the old.  You can 
worry about expanding it later.

The same should work for Windows, but you'll have to make similar 
changes in its bootloader config file (I forget the name).  Again, the 
new partition must be *exactly* the same size.  If you think you'll want 
to expand it later, be sure to leave unallocated free space after the 
end of the partition and not the beginning, as Windows Expand will only 
use contiguous trailing free space.