Changing To Different Hard Drive Size

Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX caf at omen.UUCP
Mon Jun 20 11:59:29 AEST 1988


A dump/restor cycle should work perfectly even if the file systems are
differnt sizes.  Of course, things get tricky if you are doing this to
the root file system - you need to make a boot floppy with dump/restor,
etc.

It is also possible to do a directocopy onto a larger file system, then
change the super block to reflect the larger disk size, finally an
fask-s to regenerate the free list.  Of course, you can't increase the
number of inodes that way.  And it may take longer to learn how to do
this trick than use one of the other methods.

Since I beta test new versions of Xenix, I have learned to keep a
/usr/local directory with subdirectories that correspond to /usr/bin,
/usr/lib, etc.  This mirror tree structure contains links to the
"real" programs and files that are unique to my installation.  When I
cut over to a new version or a different disk, I dump my /u files
and /usr/local plus a few other directories, and I'm ready to pull the
big switch.  With this tactic (and a tape drive) I'm up and running
on the new environment in a few hours (modulo getting HDB uucp to
behave).



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