Miscellaneous Installation Tips
Transfer one partition to another system
- unmount the filesystem (on both side).
check the source filesystem (see man fsck).
You can transfer one partition to another over the network roughly like this:
on source: cat /dev/hda1 | gzip | netcat -p 1234 destinationhost.somewhere.com
on destination: netcat -l -p 1234 | gunzip > /dev/hda1
(set the destination to listen before executing the command on the source machine)
Obviously the destination partition needs to exist and be the correct size. You can also transfer a root partition this way if you boot the machine with a bootable Linux such as Knoppix or tomsrtbt. This is a great way to clone a machine if you need to do so. Obviously you might have problems if you need very different modules/kernel/whatever on the target compared to the source.
You can check that the partition are identical using md5sum /dev/hda1.
If the destination partition is larger, you can resize the ext2/3 filesystem inside the target partition (see package e2fsprogs 's resize2fs).