Moving RHEL 6 to new HDD, EFI and LVM2 questions

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Hello everyone,

 

one year ago I installed RHEL6 on one HDD. This was my first RHEL installation, so I did not spent so much time on partitioning and so on. The partition table looks like this:

 

sda1: /boot/efi; 200MB

sda2: /boot; 200MB

tmpfs: /dev/shm: 50GB

LVM2:

/dev/mapper/lv_root: 50GB

/dev/mapper/lv_home 50GB

 

Now I want to change the HDD.

I have done that some times using "dd" or "cp -ax" and fitting the partitions and so on.

 

- But how to deal with /boot/efi? can I just dd or cp it?

- And what about the LVM? dd the partitions themselfs or the whole LVM?

 

With best,

 

Mario

ba
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Responses

RR Active Contributor 306 points
1 February 2012 4:31 PM

If you can have the old and new drives available simultaneously the LVM part is quite easy.

 

See section 13.5.2 in the LVM HOWTO.

 

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/removeadisk.html

 

In brief, pvcreate the new disk, vgextend the VG onto the new VG, and then pvmove the data to the new pv, then vgreduce the old pv from the VG.  At that point you can remove the old drive (assuming you've taken care of any other partitions/data on it)

ba Community Member 27 points
2 February 2012 2:15 PM

Hello,

 

I solved the LVM part realy easy. Just as you explained. It is my first time realy working with LVM and its just that nice and easy.

 

For the other problem I created two partitions:

1: 1000MB fat 

2: 1000MB ext4

 

I dd /boot to the new ext4 and /boot/efi to the new fat, double checked the UUIDs. Removed the old HDD, and put the new one in the slot of the old one.

Result: UEFI of my dell machine couldn't detect the GRUB. Fixed that with a live CD, doint chroot to the /boot hdd and "install-grub".

 

Now everything is on my new HDD.

 

Thanks.