i have played with linux on and off for a while but still don't know some of the basics as you will see... i am trying to move my everything from one hard disk to another so i can remove the existing hd that linux is installed on. first i created the new partitions on the new disk. i tried to cp but lost symbolic links. next i tared the existing partitions but i when i extracted the tar i still lost my symbolic links. I looked for how-tos but couldn't find what i needed. please help...

doh!

And you did this with the cp command?Does this work like xcopy?What options did you include?
Lynch

When you get this figured out, let me know too as I have to add another hard drive to put Linux on........

Thanks,

How about the man pages?

Try cp -a

I think that will work.

Don't know if you've noticed, but I seem to hark on about 'Norton Ghost' as if it was the best program since Linux . It has an option to completely copy one HD partition onto another. The partitions do not need to be on the same physical disk, so I think this would work. It does recognise and can use 'foreign' partition types, but one big downside - it only runs from a DOS disk! It is small enough to fit onto a blank floppy though.

I haven't actually used it to 'copy' complete partitions/disks, but it seems that it can be done. Oh yeah, there are lots of network options aswell (including parallel connections) so you could do this, in theory, from a local 'disk' to a remote 'disk'.

You could create an idential sized set of partitions on the new HDD and use dd copy the entire partition with something like

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1 count=<partsize>

Or use cpio to copy all the files from one partition to another where the partitions on different drives, it will handle the file perms OK and symlnks. I think something like this would work.

find /oldPart | cpio -p -d -m /newPart

I *think* both those would work, I don't see why not.

cheers!

Jamie...