Hi all
I am running Fedora 11 on my laptop (IBM T60) that has a 60 G hard
drive. A 320G hard drive was ordered and is to be replace the old one.
I would do dual boot. One goes Fedora 11 and the other goes windows XP
or 7. How can I clone the entire system on the old hard drive (i.e.
Fedora 11 with many software installed) and put it on the new drive?
Thanks.

At Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:23:13 -0800 (PST) Eugene <yjyincj@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Hi all
> I am running Fedora 11 on my laptop (IBM T60) that has a 60 G hard
> drive. A 320G hard drive was ordered and is to be replace the old one.
> I would do dual boot. One goes Fedora 11 and the other goes windows XP
> or 7. How can I clone the entire system on the old hard drive (i.e.
> Fedora 11 with many software installed) and put it on the new drive?
> Thanks.

Get an external enclosure (unless the T60 can handle having both drives
installed at the same time) and then read:

http://www.deepsoft.com/2009/01/how-to-transfer-a-linux-system-from-one-disk-to-another/

You may need a boot/rescue disk to get the boot loader set up properly.                                                                                         

-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933
Deepwoods Software        -- Download the Model Railroad System
http://www.deepsoft.com/  -- Binaries for Linux and MS-Windows
heller@deepsoft.com       -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ModelRailroadSystem/
                                                                                                             

On Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:23:13 -0800, Eugene wrote:

> Hi all
> I am running Fedora 11 on my laptop (IBM T60) that has a 60 G hard
> drive. A 320G hard drive was ordered and is to be replace the old one. I
> would do dual boot. One goes Fedora 11 and the other goes windows XP or
> 7. How can I clone the entire system on the old hard drive (i.e. Fedora
> 11 with many software installed) and put it on the new drive? Thanks.

There is no reason to clone the drive, a fresh install takes 20 minutes, 
cloning using dd will take much longer. You should just rsync your home 
directory to another machine before you pull the old drive and then rsync 
it back after you've installed the new drive. If you have any non-fedora 
software on the system you should rsync that to another machine also. 
Anything that's part of the Fedora or Fusion repositories should just be 
reinstalled. BTW I would install F12 instead of F11, it seems to be a 
better release then F11. Evolution was completely fucked on F11, it seems 
a little better on F12 although it's still broken (the last good version 
was on F9). KVM is much improved on F12, Windows VM performance sucked on 
KVM on F11, on F12 the performance is as good as VMware (Linux VM 
performance on F11 was excellent already, on F12 the big improvement is 
page sharing if you run multiple VMs). 

For XP you are on your own. If you have a recovery or XP install DVD then 
you can do a fresh install of that, however it will take much longer then 
the Fedora install. Doing a disk clone would require that you mount both 
drives in a desktop machine (the laptop only has one disk controller). 
You will need adapters to mount the drives in a desktop machine. Assuming 
that you've done that you can just use dd to copy the partitions, it will 
work for XP as well as Linux. Personally I wouldn't bother with a native 
XP installation, it's a waste of space. I use an XP VM. If you don't have 
hardware support for virtualization you can't use KVM. VMware Server will 
run a old CPUs that lack VM support and they have a really nice program 
that you can run on your native XP install and it will create a VMware 
VM. Unfortunately VMware Server isn't supported on any kernel beyond 
2.6.27 which is Fedora 9. There are patches for 2.6.30 which is used in 
F11 but I'm not sure how well they work, there aren't any patches for 
2.6.31.

General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:23:13 -0800, Eugene wrote:
>=20
> > Hi all
> > I am running Fedora 11 on my laptop (IBM T60) that has a 60 G hard
> > drive. A 320G hard drive was ordered and is to be replace the old one. I
> > would do dual boot. One goes Fedora 11 and the other goes windows XP or
> > 7. How can I clone the entire system on the old hard drive (i.e. Fedora
> > 11 with many software installed) and put it on the new drive? Thanks.
>=20
> There is no reason to clone the drive, a fresh install takes 20 minutes,=
=20
> cloning using dd will take much longer.
And then, 20 hours to reconfigure everything, and copy personal files.
dd clones everything, and, is actually very fast on modern disks. If conten=
ts of free disk space don't matter, one may use partclone.
Or, simply mkfs a new partition and use cp or star -dump -copy (this progra=
m rocks) to copy files to the new partition.
Nice thing: It'll actually "defragment" the system, which may dramatically =
improve performances of an old ext3 partition.

--=20
Andr=C3=A9 Gillibert

On Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:23:13 -0800, Eugene wrote:

> Hi all
> I am running Fedora 11 on my laptop (IBM T60) that has a 60 G hard
> drive. A 320G hard drive was ordered and is to be replace the old one. I
> would do dual boot. One goes Fedora 11 and the other goes windows XP or
> 7. How can I clone the entire system on the old hard drive (i.e. Fedora
> 11 with many software installed) and put it on the new drive? Thanks.

I think many clone tools require the new disk to be the same size. At any 
rate, when I upgraded the hard drive in my laptop, I simply used 
partimage to back up images of all the interesting partitions to an 
external drive (also works over the network), replaced the drive, 
restored to the new drive and then played games with gparted to recover 
the rest of the space.

On Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:23:49 +0100, André Gillibert wrote:

> General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:23:13 -0800, Eugene wrote:
>> 
>> > Hi all
>> > I am running Fedora 11 on my laptop (IBM T60) that has a 60 G hard
>> > drive. A 320G hard drive was ordered and is to be replace the old
>> > one. I would do dual boot. One goes Fedora 11 and the other goes
>> > windows XP or 7. How can I clone the entire system on the old hard
>> > drive (i.e. Fedora 11 with many software installed) and put it on the
>> > new drive? Thanks.
>> 
>> There is no reason to clone the drive, a fresh install takes 20
>> minutes, cloning using dd will take much longer.
> And then, 20 hours to reconfigure everything, and copy personal files.
> dd clones everything, and, is actually very fast on modern disks. If
> contents of free disk space don't matter, one may use partclone. Or,
> simply mkfs a new partition and use cp or star -dump -copy (this program
> rocks) to copy files to the new partition. Nice thing: It'll actually
> "defragment" the system, which may dramatically improve performances of
> an old ext3 partition.

It doesn't take 20 hours to reconfigure a Linux system, almost all of 
your personalization is in your home directory. You might have a couple 
of /etc files that you might want to copy, /etc/hosts, /etc/ssh, /etc/
exports, and /etc/samba, but that's probably it. All you do is a couple 
of rsyncs to another machine,

rsync -r -t -l /home othermachine:/path_to_backup
rsync -r -t -l /etc othermachine:/path_to_backup

If some other partition that contains 3rd party software or other 
personal files then you would rsync that also. Rsync is much faster then 
dd which has to copy the entire disk whereas rsync just has to copy 
files. The whole process, including installing a fresh copy of Linux, 
shouldn't take more than an hour or two depending on your network speed. 
you can do this without having to get any disk adapters, all you need is 
an Ethernet connection.

Rebuilding an XP system can easily take a few days however moving to a VM 
from native XP would be worth the pain. Once you've set up an XP VM it's 
trivial to back it up and restore it whenever XP roaches itself. Also you 
don't have to waste any disk space on an NTFS partition, you only need 
enough space for a virtual C drive. All of your Windows data can be kept 
on the Linux file system and accessed via SAMBA.