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).

External Links

Information for System Installers