Strategies after buying new hard drive

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 10:19:30PM -0500, Logan Rathbone wrote:
> Hi guys, I've got a question.  It's a matter of opnion I guess, as
> there are many ways to do what I'm trying to do.
> 
> I'll be getting a new hard drive soon (for Christmas, hopefully).
> Right now I have two hard drives.  One is 4 GB -- the first 10 megs or
> so on it have Windows's chainloader and the rest has my Linux distro
> on it.  The other is 20 GB and has Windows.  So, the hard drive I get
> will be at least 40 GB or so but I want to keep all of my Arch Linux
> OS intact (Windows is more volatile, I don't care if I have to scrap
> it).
> 
> So, should I back up important files and start from scratch?  What
> strategy should I take here -- is there a way to make a ReiserFS
> filesystem on the new hard drive and merge it with the existing 4 GB
> one at this stage of the game?

Generally starting from scrath is probably simplest.  Simply copying the
contents of the old drive to the new one with cp -ax / /newdrivemount is
pretty easy to and probably the fastest way to migrate.  With the cost
of a drive today, I doubt I would even leave the 4GB in the machine
wasting space and power and making heat.

160GB is about the best GB/$ at the moment with 200GB getting very close
quickly.

Of course make sure your BIOS can in fact run a drive biffer than
137G/32G/8G/2G/512M before you go buying one, unless you are willing to
also get a promise ide card to run it (most are supported in linux, but
check the chip number first).

I believe, but am not entirely sure that going past 137G required some
hardware changes, but perhaps it is only software.  Anything below 137G
was certainly just stupid bios designs, given the BIOS in my 486/66 can
run 137G drives just fine while many pentium and even pentium pro
systems had problems with 32G drives and sometimes even over 8G drives.

Lennart Sorensen
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