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We need to completely replace a drive in a Red Hat 4 linux box with larger drives, as we have run out of space. We are looking for utilities or applications (Ghost?) - or a process that will allow us to do this. Essentailly, we need to clone the server and put i back down on a larger drive - and expand volumes.

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You can use a live cd and simply dd the disks to image files. Switch the drives, boot on the live cd again and dd the images onto the new drives.

You can then grow the partitions and filesystems to utilize the additional capacity.

There's good information about using dd in this question: Using DD for disk cloning

Community
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Roy
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it's very easy to do this with a clonezilla live cd or gparted. If you're on lvm then you can also do this online.

Jure1873
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You might want to look at Copywipe. This is free software which I have used. It has a feature for copying, wiping, but most importantly it has a feature for copying (cloning) hardrives with expanding thathard drive doing exactly what your question asked to do.

Be warned -- it takes some time though.

Jeremy Hajek
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Add the drive to the system or a system you can connect to and rsync the whole drive over. Using something like dd is a waste of time as it copies all sectors instead of just the files.

something as simple as rsync -av / root@remote_host:/mnt/new_drive (this works over ssh also so you don't need to setup an rsync server of any kind).

This also gets away from having to "clone" the server then do an expansion which could potentially fail. Setup the drives as you want them then just copy the smaller system to the larger drives.

ScottZ
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