[Cialug] Transplant OS

[Daniel A. Ramaley]

On 2009-06-24 at 07:39:24, Paul Gray wrote:
>>Ok, my server's primary drive is in SMART Pre-Fail. It's used too
>>many of the spare sectors.  Now I need to transplant my OS to a new
>>drive.
>
>There are many ways to do what you want from a bootable distro.

There's something related that i've wondered since learning to use LVM 
in the not-too-distant past. Assuming the original disk was partitioned 
using LVM, would it be possible to live migrate to the new one with 
very little downtime (just the time required for 1 or 2 reboots)?

I presume the /boot partition would have to be copied by more 
traditional means (cp, tar, rsync) as it is usually not part of LVM, 
and grub or lilo would also have to be run on the new disk. But for the 
LVM partitions, would it be possible to extend the physical volume over 
to the new disk, then tell LVM to move the data over? For a home 
machine attempting this might be overkill, but for a critical server 
that shouldn't have any downtime, it might be worth doing. Well, if the 
server is truly "critical" then it probably has RAID and the failure of 
one drive would simply require replacing that drive... so perhaps this 
idea isn't practical after all.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Ramaley                            Dial Center 118, Drake University
Network Programmer/Analyst             2407 Carpenter Ave
+1 515 271-4540                        Des Moines IA 50311 USA