Moving existing Linux to a new system - what's the best way?

[Belisarius]

Hi,

Quick question here. I'm pretty sure this can be done and I'm pretty sure it should be straight forward but here goes...

I currently have 3 HD in my system. 2 x SATA 80GB and an IDE 250GB. In the next few days I should be taking delivery of my new mobo and Q6600. I'm also getting 2 Samsung Spinpoint 500Gb drives as well. I would like to move my entire system over to these without having to do a reinstall.

I THINK I can do it as follows:

1. install new mobo etc and hard drives.
2. boot up off live CD and create a set of matching partitions ( I have /opt and /home split off) on the new drives. Ensure that the first partitions match the existing ones (i.e. make sure /boot and / are numbers etc.
3. connect up each of the old drives in turn and copy the entire filesystem of each to the corresponding partitions.
4. edit the fstab on the system to make sure all are mapped to the correct devices
5. check that grub is looking at the right drives
6. install grub to the new drives
7. disconnect the old drives and re boot.

Will this work?

Or...

Do a fresh install on the new drives and then copy the contents of each of the old partitions overwriting what's there?

Or...

would I be better just doing a fresh install and getting the home directory over as a minimum.

And finally, given that I will have 2 physical drives and will be running VMs what would be the best combo of locations for root system, swap and whereever the virtual drives are located?

Hope someone can advise, please?

Cheers

Andy

 

[AndrewP]

would I be better just doing a fresh install and getting the home directory over as a minimum.

That's what I usually do, on a desktop system there isn't much worth keeping elsewhere except maybe some configurations in /etc if they've changed from the default. I prefer a fresh install to go along with shiny new hardware .

 

[Belisarius]

That's my normal approach but I've got the system pretty sell setup how I want it with quite a few additional apps installed (both via packages and in /opt) so wanted to avoid having to reinstall it all. Suppose it may be the easier option. Must remember to back off my xorg.conf file though as that would be a swine to have to recreate!

Andy