Subject: Moving to a new drive
To: port-mac68k mailing list <port-mac68k@netbsd.org>
From: Steve Revilak <revilak@umbsky.cc.umb.edu>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 10/24/1998 20:55:17
Something I'll be fortunate enough to do in the next week or two (Hoping),
having outgrown the 160 mb drive that I currently devote to NetBSD.  My
plans were to pick up something in the 700mb - 1.2 gig range (anything I
should avoid?  Quantums?).

I'd just like to run my upgrade plans by those on the list, just to see
they appear reasonable.....

The existing drive lives in an external enclosure, formated with a single
root & usr partition.  The new drive will take it's place in the same
enclosure, thus having them both on line at once really isn't an option.

The basic idea was to tar ( -cpv ) the root filesystem to a DDS drive with
the exception of /proc and /kern.  Next, install and format the new HD with
a swap partition, and seperate root & usr partitions.  Then, use the
installer to install a kernel, the base set & my existing etc.

>From there, I figure that I can recreate fstab, rebuild the device files
and boot.  Finally, boot with the new drive & extract the tape archive at
the root directory  ( tar -xvp --unlink).  Just to be safe, I'll probably
do the tar/extract operations in single-user mode.

Questions:  even though the current drive is root & usr, and the new one
will have seperate partitions, I'd presume everything will end up in the
correct places, no?

Any flags to tar that I'm missing?

Finally, although I remember there being problems with drives over 1 gig in
size, the smaller ones are getting very difficult to find these days. I
haven't seen this as the topic of much discussion these days.  What's the
official status ?

Again, as always, thanks!

Steve Revilak
revilak@umbsky.cc.umb.edu