Final question: best wasy to move /, /usr, /home, etc?

[Tom Rini]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 02:36:01AM +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2002-02-18 at 02:17, Kevin B. Hendricks wrote:
> >
> > I am finally at the point I want to give up my old external scsi hard
> > drives.  Unfrotunately, my current /, /usr, /home, etc all exist on scsi
> > drives.
> >
> > I recently purchased a 60 gig hard drive (ide) and have now installed it.
> >
> > What is the best way to move all of the files and directories, and special
> > device files, and etc from the scsi drive to new partitions on the IDE
> > drives?
> >
> > Can I simply use a recursive "cp" with -a?  Should I use "tar"?  What
> > about "parted" and its partition copies?
> >
> > Or is there some way I can run an linux distribution installer from within
> > linux and make it install to the ide drive instead of the scsi?
> >
> > Or is there some way to make "rpm" nicely redirect where it installs
> > things?
> >
> >
> > In fact, with som much space, I would love to have Debian, SuSE, and
> > YellowDog distribution sets so I can run and test OpenOffice.org against
> > those distributions easily (shared build drives) with different
> > distribution installations.
> >
> > This is my last step to get a working system so any hints on the best way
> > to move so much data (and special device files) from one partition to
> > another preserving the owner,group,word, permissions, file ownership,
> > setuid root bits, etc. would be greatly appreciated.
>
> I've done this several times, to install xfs support on live machines
> (ie. on my desktop and laptop that were already full of crap junk and
> other kind of files).
>
> rsync -av --exclude /proc --exclude /home/ / /newroot/
>
> Exclude every mount point from the rsync and do this for every
> partition. Best is to do this from a separate root, or a rescue/boot
> disk, in which case rsync -av /oldroot/ /newroot/ is easy enough without
> having to care.
>

I _think:
rsync -av -x / /newroot/
will get just the / partition (-x means one fs, cp and a few others take
this arg).

> PS: sick people will tell you to use tar with loads of pipes, or cpio,
> don't listen to them ;)

tar -c /{this,this,somethingelse,another} | tar -x -C /newroot

Or so, I think.

--
Tom Rini (TR1265)
http://gate.crashing.org/~trini/

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