[wplug] Backing up (cloning) to a smaller drive...

[Paul Armor]

Hi,

On Mon, 13 Aug 2007, scoob8000 wrote:

> I'm trying to backup one hard drive to another.  Problem being is my new
> drive is about several megs smaller than the old one.
>
> The system is Fedora installed with the default ext3/LVM setup.
>
> I figure I need to resize my ext3 partition a bit so everything will fit on
> the new drive.
>
> I don't know much at all about LVM, and all of the partitioning tools I'm
> familier with lists the partition type as UNKNOWN.
>
> Can someone point me in the right direction here?  :)


<gross hack>
I don't remember if I've gone from larger -> smaller, or smaller -> 
larger, but I THINK I went from a larger partition to a smaller partition 
on the same disk and it worked... I also don't remember if this was ext2 
or ext3...

I dd'ed from partition a -> partition b ("dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hda2 
bs=$filesystem-block-size?"), which put the data in the proper place, then 
ran mkfs on that partition.  I mounted that partition and magically my 
data was there ;-)
</gross hack>

Maybe that'd help?

Cheers,
Paul