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Partitions / upgrade

Phil Maley

Partitions / upgrade
« on: September 20, 2002, 10:27:21 AM »
Hi all
Yesterday I decided I'd better upgrade my old E-Smith 4.1 to the latest version. I had a spare HDD which already had another version of Linux installed so I carried out the following steps:

1. Shut down the box
2. Installed the spare drive as secondary master
3. Booted up from a DOS diskette and ran Norton Ghost.
4. Copied the primary master DISK to the seconday master.
5. Shut down, removed the primary master drive and swapped the new copy to primary master so that I could do the upgrade on the "spare" drive.
6. Installed the 5.5 upgrade and installed patches 1 and 2.

All seems to be OK, EXCEPT I've now discovered the partition layout is as follows:

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1582 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1         3     24066   83  Linux
/dev/hda2             4      1580  12667252+   f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5             4         4      8001   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda6             5      1580  12659188+  83  Linux

Obviously my swap partition is way too small and I'm also wondering if /dev/hda2 being type "f" is likely to cause any problems. It's been running happily for 24 hours now so looks like it could be OK.

I think I need to copy each partition back to the old drive. What do you think?

Regards
Phil Maley

Phil Maley

Re: Partitions / upgrade
« Reply #1 on: September 23, 2002, 02:21:08 PM »
File note:

The small swap file turned out to be a major problem, causing occasional disk thrashing. There appears to be no safe way to change partition sizes on a Linux HDD so I decided to copy the whole system over to another drive. I would have liked to make a good copy of the drive to a replacement drive using rsync and looked everywhere for a rescue floppy or CD with rsync but none seem to have it. So I gave up on that idea and decided I would have to copy from the live system to the backup.

I temporarily installed a spare HDD as secondary master /dev/hdc and partitioned it manually for the new system as follows.

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdc1   *         1         3     24066   83  Linux
/dev/hdc2             4      1247   9992430    5  Extended
/dev/hdc5             4        20    136521   82  Linux swap
/dev/hdc6            21      1247   9855846   83  Linux

Next I did a mke2fs on /dev/hdc1 and /dev/hdc6 and a mkswap on /dev/hdc5.
Then swapon /dev/hdc6 to prevent the thrashing problem.

Next, I mounted the new partitions:

mount /dev/hdc1 /newdisk/boot
mount /dev/hdc2 /newdisk/main

then used rsync to copy the operating system across:

rsync -ax / /newdisk/main/
rsync -ax /boot /newdisk/boot/

Next, shut down, remove the old main drive, put the replacement in as /dev/hda.
Boot up with a slackware rescue disk, with mount root=/dev/hda6 at the prompt.
Discovered a problem with partition mounting  - drops into single user read-only mode. Run mount -n -o remount,rw / to get it to read-write.
Edit /etc/fstab to explicitly state the partitions to be mounted.
Mount /dev/hda1 /boot to access the kernel image file.
Run lilo.
All looks ok so reboot.
Reboots cleanly! Hooray!
That's all for now.

Phil Maley