Change Boot Loader and OS Partition

Question

I'm moving my OS from 1 drive to another. I have used Drive Image XML to copy the OS partition image to a different partition on a different physical drive. I want to remove the original OS drive and use the new one. Do I need to move the boot loader or something or can I just set the new drive to boot in bios?

Answer 1

dd if=/dev/olddrive of=/dev/newdrive

remove old drive, done. dd will copy everything including MBR, plus its free.

Answer 2

A http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/ B http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/320gb-hdd-showing-up-as-80gb-after-using-gparted-698646/

C http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-newbie/1960-harddisk-cloning.html

Answer 3

Yes, the boot loader needs to be copied. IIRC, you just need to copy the first 512 bytes of the boot drive to the first 512 bytes of the 2nd drive if you've already copied all the data over.

dd if=/dev/hdX of=/dev/hdY bs=512 count=1

(where hdX and hdY are your old/new drives).

Disclaimer: It's been a long time since I've done this so that syntax might be incorrect and might totally screw up your new disk. Use at your own risk! (If it does screw it up, just re-clone it).