RHEL Tech: Upgrade the old HDD to new HDD in RHEL 5.x

Objective:

To upgrade the old HDD replace with new one without data loss. (New HDD size more than old HDD)

Releases:

Red hat Enterprises Linux 5.x

Procedure:

Note: Check the drives in Linux. /dev/sda should be your old drive. /dev/sdb should be your new drive.

# dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=446 count=1

# sfdisk -d /dev/sda > part_back

# sfdisk /dev/sdb < part_back

Note: If you are having more than 4 partition means you need to follow the below steps for using the free spaces.

a. First redirect only 3 partition by editing the part_back file using the vi editor

# vi part_back

# Partition table of /dev/sda

Unit: sectors

/dev/sda1 : start= 63, size= 208782, Id=83, bootable

/dev/sda2 : start= 208845, size= 1044225, Id=82

/dev/sda3 : start= 1253070, size= 9012465, Id=83

b. Now redirect this partition dump file to 2nd HDD

# sfdisk /dev/sdb < part_back

c. Create the extended partition manually by using fdisk command

# fdisk /dev/sdb

d. Now dump this 2nd HDD partition table to different file.

# sfdisk –d /dev/sdb > part_back1

e. Once again take the partition dump of first HDD

# sfdisk –d /dev/sda > part_back

f. Replace the 4th partition details (extended) of part_back using part_back1 and save the file.

g. Now redirect to 2nd HDD by using sfdisk

#sfdisk /dev/sdb < part_back

Now manually create the FS on all the partitions depending upon your partition ID.

# mke2fs –j /dev/sdb1

# mkswap /dev/sdb2

# mke2fs –j /dev/sdb3

# mke2fs –j /dev/sdb5

# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=64k

# dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sdb2 bs=64k

# dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/dev/sdb3 bs=64k

# dd if=/dev/sda5 of=/dev/sdb5 bs=64k

Now booted through the 2nd hard disk OS will boot and also you are able to use the free spaces.

RHEL Tech