[ale] Dupe drive with slightly different capacity

[JD]

Start with dd to copy the entire HDD.
Use parted/gparted to resize.
Be happy.

If the HDDs are different sector sizes (512b vs 4k), then use gparted on the new
HDD and fsarchive to migrate all the file systems to the new HDD.  gparted will
copy partitions too. The change in sector sizes does matter.

If the new HDD needs to be GPT and the old one is MSDOS ... I think gparted is
the answer, but a fresh install is needed to deal with boot differences.  I just
did the 512b-->4k and MBR-->GPT switch a few weeks ago. It was not smooth.
Ended up doing a fresh install first, then moving data over, then taking a list
of installed packages and installing those. This is based on my normal
backup/restore method (which does NOT backup the entire OS). I backup OS
settings, lists of packages, and data.

Of course, there are 50 other ways to accomplish the same thing. rsync,
backup/restore, ... those might be easier for you, depending on your normal way
of doing things.

On 02/22/2014 03:51 AM, Alex Carver wrote:
> Ok, so I'll be moving in a month or two at which point I will finally be
> able to pull my mail server out of its hard to reach hiding place and
> swap out the dying drive for a replacement.  The new drive is identical
> hardware but ever so slightly different in capacity.
> 
> My original plan was going to be to simply blast the contents of the
> problem drive onto the replacement with dd (booting to single user mode
> first) then pull the old one out.  But, if I wanted to go through with a
> clone that would let me use a bigger drive for the data, what's the most
> straightforward way to accomplish that?  The system has only one drive
> with two partitions, root and swap.  Swap would probably stay the same
> and root should just grow to fill the rest of the drive.