Transferring Linux to another computer

Introduction

I want to share my own experience of transferring the system to another computer, completely and completely different hardware configuration.
In fact, the options to transfer the system a lot. Everyone has their own approach. I will describe the method that is most suitable for beginners.

What we have

So, here is the configuration of my source computer, with the OS installed:
Motherboard: Intel S3200shv
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
Memory: 8GB
Raid 1 with a capacity of 300 GB
OS: Fedora 12 i686
For brevity, we will call it a “donor”.

Computer configuration assignment:
Motherboard: Intel Desktop Board D845EBG2
Processor: Celeron 2GHz
Memory: 512MB
HDD 160 GB
It will be "patient."
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As you can see, systems differ completely and completely. Including sizes of hard drives. But there is nothing wrong with that.
On the original system, my partitions looked like this:
# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/dm-6 5.0G 2.5G 2.2G 53% /
/dev/dm-1 194M 55M 130M 30% /boot
/dev/dm-5 4.0G 141M 3.7G 4% /tmp
/dev/dm-3 99G 257M 94G 1% /var/db
/dev/dm-7 2.0G 87M 1.8G 5% /var/log
/dev/dm-2 173G 229M 164G 1% /var/www


In short, the algorithm will be as follows:
1. Create sections from the “donor” as you wish.
2. Install on the destination computer the same system as on the source computer.
3. Connect to the source computer HDD destination computer
4. Copy files from the “donor” sections to the “patient” sections.

Many, instead of the second step, rule the sections manually. I suggest the installation, so this method seems to me simpler and more universal. So that you do not suffer with reinstalling the bootloader and editing / etc / fstab.

Step one

I marked up my HDD using the pmagic boot disk. Convenient and clear.
I created sections one-to-one, just like on the source computer, only smaller in size, since The “patient” HDD is smaller.

Step Two

Installing Fedora on the prepared HDD was quick and seamless. True, at first I could not run it in graphical mode, because there was a bar only 256 MB. I had to replace it with 512 and the process went.

Step Three

For a start, I advise you to do some training with the “donor”. This is install kudzu:
yum install kudzu
Just in case, use dd to create a backup of the source system. You never know, what if you confuse something when copying files because of inattention?
Next, turn off both computers, connect to the “donor” HDD hard drive, on which we just installed the same system. Boot from the livecd.

Step Four

Go to the console, create two directories under the root: / mnt / donor / and / mnt / pacient /. Within each directory, I created subdirectories, and there I mounted the “donor” HDD partitions into / mnt / donor /, and the “patient” HDD partitions into / mnt / pacient /.
Now you can start copying files. But before, a very important note! There are some exceptions that do not need to copy from the "donor"! Create somewhere exclude_list file containing these exceptions:
/etc/fstab
/boot/grub/grub.conf
/proc
/sys
/dev
/mnt
/media

And now we copy files with pom. commands:
rsync -xrlptgoEv --progress --exclude-from=///exclude_list //// ////
Similarly, we execute the above command for all mounted partitions. Only necessarily at the end "/ path / from / copy /" specify a slash.
Reboot.

After the reboot, the system started without any problems. In the logs I did not swear at anything. The only thing I had to do was edit the file / etc / sysconfig / network-scripts / ifcfg-eth0, because The MAC address was copied from the donor computer. Well, the autoloading of the programs was fixed with the help of ntsysv.
It would be cool if you could do the same trick with Windows.