Best way to transfer Linux to another drive...

[Zylstra]

I think I am going to grab an unused older 40GB drive from my school for my server so I can better to remote backups...

I tried using a clone tool, more than one in fact, to get Linux onto a different drive before, however, I never really had any luck at it.

My question is: What is the best way to transfer Linux from one drive to another larger one?

Also, while I am at it: How good are software-based RAID systems (using no hardware RAID interface)?

And, my motherboard has a regular old IDE cable interface... can I connect more than two drives to it if I have a cable that is split into three, and can I use the one mainly intended for the CD-ROM drives for hard drive?

[Aegis]

can I connect more than two drives to it if I have a cable that is split into three

I've never seen three on an IDE cable, before.

and can I use the one mainly intended for the CD-ROM drives for hard drive?

Yes.

[Zylstra]

So, I could potentially put 4 drives in my computer?

[Geek-9pm]

Yes, you can put four good IDE drives on one computer. Use good quality cables. Make sue the drives are similar in quality and structure.
There is a utility often used in Linux for partition management. It can also copy portions to free space. If the disks are perfect, it works find. If the disks are flaky..er.. not so good.

Google this:
Gparted hard disk partition manager for Linux

I have it on a Bookable USB drive. 

[banjo67xxx]

AFAIK you can only have a Master and Slave on an IDE bus, so I assume you have 2 IDE buses in which case you can connect 4 drives (i.e. 3 disk drives and 1 DVD drive)

If you already have Linux booted on the system then you don't need to use GPartEd as you can run fdisk from linux to partition the new drive.

There are several ways to copy the filesystems from your old drive to the new one. I think that the easiest would be to download Knoppix and use that to boot from DVD, and then use dd to copy the original boot partition to the new boot partition (its never a good idea to use dd to copy the root filesystem whilst you are booted from it, as dd has no way of keeping track of what changes occured whilst the disk is being used, and fsck might not be able to repair the copy)

You need to ensure the destination partition is the same size or bigger than the source partition, and if you want you can grow the filesystem you can use resize2fs

The final step is to use install-grub to make the new disk bootable, and if you're doing all this from Knoppix don't forget to mount the filesystem on /mnt and use --root-directy=/mnt

[joking]

put drive 2 on primary ide secondary.  Make sure to move jumper to secondary position before inserting drive.  Boot into linux.  Login with root.  at the # sign type in the following:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

this will make an exact duplicate of the first drive.  do a shutdown and power off.  Change the drive jumper again to primary and you should boot off it to make sure its working before transfering it to a new case.

warning it may take some time depending on the size of the drives involved.  also one other thing, the new drive should be as large as if not larger than the older drive.

Mind you if there is any difference in the motherboard this drive is installed with you will need to make sure kudzu runs if it's 7.2 or newer OS, to unconfigure and configure the new motherboard's devices.

[Zylstra]

I use Ultimate Boot CD, anyone familiar with that at all?

Anyways, I tried using multiple cloning tools in it, and none worked... should I assume it was a configuration problem, or something else?

[Geek-9pm]

The UBCD you have may be older software.
The free Linux partition manager is here:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
Gnome Partition Editor is also on bistros like Ubuntu.
Try it. Is is free.
 

[Aegis]

Pretty good food at the Ubuntu bistro ... 

[Geek-9pm]

Pretty good food at the Ubuntu bistro ...  Wink

Yeah, did you see me there?

[BC_Programmer]

they wouldn't let us in the VIP room. something about lacking the beak for it.