HowTo: Transfer your bootable Ubuntu installation between hard drives

[JohnMac]

Thanks for your good Howto.I followed your procedure but, although I made a copy, I have not been able to get it to boot on its own.
I have a plug IDE drive the same size as my normal HDD and I am trying to make a bootable copy so I can be ready should my new Natty instal fails.
All goes well until I get to step 5)sudo grub. The response is "command not found" The copy HDD will boot as long as the normal HDD is there, but won't boot if I disconnect the main HDD. I get: error: out of disk. grub rescue.

My Boot Info Script (can't recall how to attach it) does show something not right with my Boot Sector info - "core.img cannot be found at this location"

My system: Desktop AMD Dual 5200 CPU, 2G RAM, Geforce N439GT graphics.
HDD: SATA 160G and IDE 160G removable.
Distro: Maverick

Any Hints?

[Zookalicious]

Might be worth mentioning, dd uses an incredibly small bit size by default, which makes the speed very very slow when copying.

To fix this, specify a larger bit size. I use roughly 4 MB and that sped up the transfer by about 15 times!

sudo dd if=FROM of=TO bs=4194304

Also, if you want to see the progress of dd once it has already started running, run the following command in a seperate terminal window:

watch -n 10 killall -USR1 dd

Source: http://enhancedlinux.com/2010/07/11/check-the-status-of-dd-command/

You'll now see when you switch back to the window / virtual terminal that dd is running in that it has started to output how much data it has transfered. Really useful.

[Zookalicious]

... All goes well until I get to step 5)sudo grub. The response is "command not found" ...
Any Hints?

This guide is a bit old. Ubuntu no longer uses the old version of grub but now rather uses GRUB2. A very good guide on how to install grub2 from a liveCD is availible here: http://www.webtechquery.com/index.ph...-from-live-cd/

Hope it helps!