Ext3 users - Mar 2002 - Cloning an EXT3 drive?

Hello:

I've been using EXT3 for awhile with Slackware Linux.  I setup a master 
drive and I've been cloning it to identical hard drives using a hardware 
cloning device.  My new batch of hard drives are a different size, so I 
can't use the hardware cloner.

Is there any way to move the drive to a new, larger drive short of 
re-installing everything from scratch to make a new master?

Thanks,

Dan

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       Dan Crowson                     |    dcrowson@cmsc.com
       CMS Communications, Inc.        |    dcrowson@crowson.com
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Hi,

On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 08:23:20AM -0600, Dan Crowson
wrote:
> Hello:
> 
> I've been using EXT3 for awhile with Slackware Linux.  I setup a master
> drive and I've been cloning it to identical hard drives using a
hardware
> cloning device.  My new batch of hard drives are a different size, so I 
> can't use the hardware cloner.
> 
> Is there any way to move the drive to a new, larger drive short of 
> re-installing everything from scratch to make a new master?
"parted" should be able to resize an unmounted partition for you.

Incidentally, Ted, having an "e2image" option to select whether or not
to copy data would be neat for doing such raw filesystem copies.  We
could also add the ability to create a new uuid for the copied
filesystem.  That would be safer all round, _and_ faster, than relying
on hardware disk duplicators.  Hmm, maybe time to hack...

Cheers,
 Stephen

On Wed, 2002-03-20 at 14:23, Dan Crowson wrote:
> Hello:
> 
> I've been using EXT3 for awhile with Slackware Linux.  I setup a master
> drive and I've been cloning it to identical hard drives using a
hardware
> cloning device.  My new batch of hard drives are a different size, so I 
> can't use the hardware cloner.
> 
> Is there any way to move the drive to a new, larger drive short of 
> re-installing everything from scratch to make a new master?
You could attach the old and the new drive to a machine and dd the old
to the new - will leave some wasted space at the end.

Following this you could use gnu parted to move and resize your
partitions.  You may need to use tune2fs to remove the journal before
doing this and then put it back on again afterwards (not used parted for
a while so not sure how it handles journals now - especially now they do
not appear in the main fs).

I am not sure how the boot block would be affected by this procedure.

	Nigel.

> On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 02:39:15PM +0000, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
> 
> Following this you could use gnu parted to move and resize your
> partitions.  You may need to use tune2fs to remove the journal before
> doing this and then put it back on again afterwards (not used parted for
> a while so not sure how it handles journals now - 
> especially now they do not appear in the main fs).
> 
> From: Stephen C. Tweedie [mailto:sct@redhat.com]
> It should be OK, I think --- the journal is just another inode, and
> there's nothing special about the way the kernel finds the data.  I
> don't think that parted looks at the directory structure at all so the
> fact that it's a hidden inode shouldn't matter; but, I haven't
tested
> it.

Using parted to resize an unmounted ext3 filesystem worked without using
tune2fs.
Cheers,
-Mike Slifcak