Hard drive Upgrade

[johntramp]

Hi, I am planning on getting a new 160gb hdd in the next week or so, and was wondering how I would go about installing it? I am using debian and have 2 hard drives totalling around 70 gb. To install the new hard drive can I just copy everything from one to the other, onto new partitions, remove the old hard drives and exit the fstab and grub? Or is there some other way of doing it? Thanks

[sharth]

and probably reinstall grub's bootloader.

[bandwidth_pig]

Well, odds are your new hard drive will come with a PCI Promise controller...depending on vendor. I should have stated that first. Most all of the larger Western Digital drives these days come with a Promise PCI controler. So you slap the controler into a PCI slot, it in turn has IDE ports on it, and you plug your new hard disk into your controler. Makes it quite nice really. So, if this is the case for you, why remove the other drives at all? Keep them all in. That way you don't have the whole data restoration issue.

Instead, what you do is take a look at dmesg once you have the drive installed. It will list the device name for it in there somehwere. Create a mount point for the drive somewhere (eg: go to / and just make a directory) then edit /etc/fstab with the necessary info (device name, mount point...etc) and mount the new drive. Then create your new file system and your all done. There is a good file on this in the library I believe.

[johntramp]

yes, I have room for another drive, just I have an old computer all ready to run apart for it has no cd drive so one of the drives will become a hand-me down :)