[clug] Moving the contents of / to a new filesystem on Ubuntu?

[Craig Small]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 12:10:59AM +1000, Michael Still wrote:
> Is there a nice tool in Ubuntu which will support moving the
> contents of / to this file system without a reinstall? I could do it
> manually, but its fiddly to do while remote from the machine, which
> I will be for the next 10 days.
Hello Mikal,
  I've used the double tar trick a few times and that works for most
files.  Strange things like sockets won't transfer over and there used
to be some problem with /tmp but that was a while ago.

Try to have most things not running so your number of open files is
down.  You can have some problems with open files.

cd /
tar cf - . | ( cd /newdir ; tar xf - )

I've used that a lot, especially when drives didn't used to be that
good.  Make the second tar xvf if you want to see what is going on.

 - Craig

-- 
Craig Small      GnuPG:1C1B D893 1418 2AF4 45EE  95CB C76C E5AC 12CA DFA5
http://www.enc.com.au/                             csmall at : enc.com.au
http://www.debian.org/          Debian GNU/Linux, software should be Free