How Do I upgrade from one hard drive to another larger drive under FreeBSD?

[HMIBarryLSalter]

I saw this thread, not that I understood it:

http://forum.sw-soft.com/showthread...w+Do+I+upgrade+from+one+hard+drive+to+another


What I’d really like to know please is: Is there a step by step process that I can do to upgrade from my 80 gig drive to a new 160gig drive without loosing Plesk settings or database or permissions?

I would like to (at the same time) upgrade from FreeBSD 4.9 to 5.3 UNLESS someone has a reason that I shouldn’t take the plunge.

To give you a list of available resources, I have:

2 DFI Lan Party Pro875B mother boards with IDE Raid on them (one in production)
4 160 gig Maxtor Hard Drives (2 are mirrored in the production box but as 80 gig drives and 80 gigs free)
2 80 gig seagates Hard-Drives (1 is sitting idle in the production server)
each board has a gigabit nic and an Intel pro 100 Nic card
each has a pci video card


The second machine is off line and is new so it can be used for preparing whatever can be done without taking the server down.


If this was an NT box, I would use Norton Ghost to Ghost one 80 partition to the 160 partition and then re-mirror the drives. Since it’s not, I don’t have a clue what to do.

Thank You for reading this and any for any answers you can give (or opinions too please!!!)



HMIBarryLSalter –

 

[jamesyeeoc]

My recommendation:

1. Do the drive copy first, then worry about the OS upgrade afterwards.

Assuming you will have both the original drive and the new larger one available at the same time and a Windows machine handy:

Download and install the trial version of Acronis True Image (2 week trial version installs and runs on Windows, but can and will do the copy/resize properly whereas Norton's Ghost is crappy). They support the following partition types:
FAT16/32, NTFS, Linux Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, and Linux SWAP

Attach the 2 *nix drives to your Windows PC (so you have your Windows drive booting, and the other 2 drives). Run True Image, choose "Disk Clone".

If you then select "Automatic" your partitions will be adjusted automatically, unfortunately this includes /boot (which I don't like to be too big). So I choose "Manual" and then have the option to resize the partitions which I want to be bigger. The Resizing is not as easy as Partition Magic was, nor as friendly as Ghost, but within a few minutes of experimenting is not too difficult to figure out and get the sizes the way you want them.

Then once you have done that and it has finished cloning the drive, test the new drive. If all is good (and it should be), then I usually make additional clone(s) of the new bigger drive as a backup and to use for testing Plesk updates/upgrades in the future.

If you find that TI works for you, during the trial period, it shows you a link to click where they have discounted 'upgrade' pricing which is well worth it, rather than paying Symantec/Norton for their ****.

Acronis has other products as well, they have so many, and some of them overlap, like True Image is included in a couple of other of their products, so if you end up buying, call and talk to their sales people to clarify which product(s) are currently included in which other ones....

Hope this helps.

 

[HMIBarryLSalter]

Hi James!!

Thank you for the excellent reply!!!

I have downloaded the free 15 day trial of Acronis True Image from http://www.acronis.com/

And I follow you on the resizing first, in fact, I’m going to resize our last backup copy (mirror break from upgrading to Plesk 7.5.4) it’s one of the 80s and I have two 160s that I can use one to try this on first before taking down the production machine.

Now assuming that we take down the production machine, we use acronis to resize to another drive and that all works. How do we upgrade to FreeBSD 5.3 ?

And there is a twist, we have already upgraded to Plesk 7.5.4 for ver 4.9. After upgrading to FreeBSD 5.3 do we just run the 5.3 compatible upgrade over top?

(and by the way, he was impressed with your re-write for apache and has not an idea on this other than running a backup zip and restore kind of thing so this is fantastic, thank you!!).



HMIBarryLSalter -

 

[jamesyeeoc]

Originally posted by HMIBarryLSalter
How do we upgrade to FreeBSD 5.3 ?

And there is a twist, we have already upgraded to Plesk 7.5.4 for ver 4.9. After upgrading to FreeBSD 5.3 do we just run the 5.3 compatible upgrade over top?

Haven't a clue, that's why I didn't post about that. It's been way too long since I used FreeBSD. Even with RedHat systems, I don't do an OS upgrade on a production server, I build a new box and then manually move domains over. I'd rather do it by hand rather than suffer the bugs in their Migration Manager.

Originally posted by HMIBarryLSalter
...and by the way, he was impressed with your re-write for apache and has not an idea on this other than running a backup zip ...

'He'? - ah, your sysadmin person? Apache ReWrite's are actually pretty easy once you understand how they work and what they can do. I've been doing a lot of ReWrite posts lately.

There are many ways to do 'backups', but for upgrading to a larger server, and where in your case you have ready access to the server, this Acronis cloning option is nice. There are others who's server(s) are located hundreds or thousands of miles away from them and this would not be a viable method.

 

[PaulC]

I would have another machine ready, with 5.3 installed.
Once Plesk is installed on the new server I would use the backup utilities and switch across the IP.

As far as I know, they dont recommend upgrading from 4.x to 5.x

 

[Spyder]

Using the Ideia of jamesyeeoc, you can mount by NFS or using FTP to mode your data (user´s data) to new machine.

Then release to production.

Tia.

The 5.x have performance improvments.. but 4.x is and very stable release.. and besides this..

" If i´ts not broken... don´t try fix"

Tia