problems after duplicating disk

[balak]

I was running out of space on my destop (with 160Gb hard drive) so I decided to upgrade to a 500Gb drive. I wanted to keep all my custom program/installations (I have been using ubuntu from breezy and upgrading every few months) and not have to reinstall ubuntu. So I decided to create new partitions on the new hard drive and copy the data from the old hard drive using 'dd'

For every partition, I did
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 and so on.
(sda - old drive, sdb - new drive)

However, the new partitions I had created were much bigger than the original partitions. For ex. sda2 (the root partition) was 10GB, while sdb2 was 20GB.

The duplication/transfer went off fine and I am currently using the new hard drive. However, when I check the remaining space on the partition using 'df' I get the same data as the old drive. gparted shows the right size for partitions but the "used" column looks bogus to me.

I have attached a snapshot of gparted, df (terminal on the left), fdisk -l (terminal on the right).

Is there a simple way I can get back the space ? My root partition is running out of space and I would like to install some stuff in it. I tried copying a big file to /tmp (which comes under the root partition) but it errorred out with "no space left on device"

Thanks!

[balak]

Actually attaching the snapshot

[blackgr]

I was running out of space on my destop (with 160Gb hard drive) so I decided to upgrade to a 500Gb drive. I wanted to keep all my custom program/installations (I have been using ubuntu from breezy and upgrading every few months) and not have to reinstall ubuntu. So I decided to create new partitions on the new hard drive and copy the data from the old hard drive using 'dd'

For every partition, I did
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 and so on.
(sda - old drive, sdb - new drive)

However, the new partitions I had created were much bigger than the original partitions. For ex. sda2 (the root partition) was 10GB, while sdb2 was 20GB.

The duplication/transfer went off fine and I am currently using the new hard drive. However, when I check the remaining space on the partition using 'df' I get the same data as the old drive. gparted shows the right size for partitions but the "used" column looks bogus to me.

I have attached a snapshot of gparted, df (terminal on the left), fdisk -l (terminal on the right).

Is there a simple way I can get back the space ? My root partition is running out of space and I would like to install some stuff in it. I tried copying a big file to /tmp (which comes under the root partition) but it errorred out with "no space left on device"

Thanks!

Wrong wrong wrong. You do it all wrong. wipe your 500GB disk and do it again. Boot from a rescue cd or ubuntu live cd. Then do this


dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

You dont have to create the partitions manually. This command will copy the complete 160GB disk with all its partitions and partition table to the new drive.

[balak]

Wrong wrong wrong. You do it all wrong. wipe your 500GB disk and do it again. Boot from a rescue cd or ubuntu live cd. Then do this


dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

You dont have to create the partitions manually. This command will copy the complete 160GB disk with all its partitions and partition table to the new drive.

Thanks for replying!

But I really don't want to have exactly the same partitions. I wanted to grow my /, /home, /music and /data partitions when I changed to the new disk.

[blackgr]

Thanks for replying!

But I really don't want to have exactly the same partitions. I wanted to grow my /, /home, /music and /data partitions when I changed to the new disk.

JUst do this and after your system is working to your new drive you can resize partitions from a live cd with gparted

[caljohnsmith]

How about booting your Live CD (the Ubuntu install CD), open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and do:

sudo umount /dev/sda1
sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sda1
sudo resize2fs /dev/sda1
And repeat that for all your new partitions. Then boot back into your Ubuntu install, and please post the output of:

df -h
We can work from there if you want.

[balak]

caljohnsmith - you are the man! e2fsck and resize2fs did the trick.
Now I have the correct sizes for each of my partitions.

Here is the output of


$df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 20G 9.3G 9.7G 49% /
tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /lib/init/rw
varrun 2.0G 212K 2.0G 1% /var/run
varlock 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /var/lock
udev 2.0G 2.9M 1.9G 1% /dev
tmpfs 2.0G 44K 2.0G 1% /dev/shm
lrm 2.0G 2.4M 2.0G 1% /lib/modules/2.6.27-9-generic/volatile
/dev/sda6 99G 45G 50G 48% /home
/dev/sda7 99G 188M 94G 1% /music
/dev/sda8 197G 63G 125G 34% /data
/dev/sdb1 459G 164G 273G 38% /backup

[caljohnsmith]

Great, glad to hear that worked OK. I learned that trick from forum member meierfra, so you can give him credit for it. Cheers and enjoy your Ubuntu install. :)