[Mageia-discuss] Copying system to new disk

[Juergen Harms]

Thanks for all these comments. I am now mailing from my newly installed 
(yes: installed) system. It is worth while to sum up my experience:

- Copying (tar) an about 15 Gb partition takes about 15 minutes (< 1 
hour for the 3 partitions I needed) - much faster than any installing

- Perfect for the data partition

- I had some problems on details with my bootable Mga partition 
(/etc/fstab still had one partition as ext3 which I had not yet 
migrated, the new disk evidently is all ext4)

- After fixing this, the copied partition booted nicely, execept that 
during boot I had persistently to wait for 1 min timeouts for the boot 
partition and the swap partition to "become visible" - maybe simply a 
question of UIDs (I used /dev/sd<xx>) - but that is where I gave up, 
considering that a fresh install takes less of my time (but I copied the 
entire user home directory, thus avoiding to do all the kde 
customisations - I have quite a lot to do).

- Given this experience, I postponed doing the Windows partition - will 
try copying, but am sceptical. Thanks for your references, I still need 
to read them in detail. Copying Windows would be nice - installing and 
than loading the service pack and updates is -timewise - is quite a pain 
in the neck.

Nevertheless, all work on the Mageia partitiondone, I lost no data: just 
celebrated this with a couple of bubbles!