Moving root and /home to new hard drive

[Mercury_Alpha]

I purchased a new hard drive, and I would like to move Ubuntu 9.10's root and /home partitions to it. But all the guides I've seen for this process seem to refer to GRUB Legacy, while I'm using GRUB2. I've Googled some discussion threads, but what I've seen so far looks kind of ridiculously complicated.

I'm also dual-booting with Windows 7.

[2hot6ft2]

Everyone seems to like clonezilla.
http://www.clonezilla.org/
That will take care of the cloning the partitions part.

If you're going to have ubuntu on a drive separate from win 7 then you will need to find out if the win 7 drive will be loading first in the BIOS. If it is then you'll need to reinstall grub 2 to it overwriting the grub 2 that's already there so it points to ubuntus new location, that's all. Unless there's something else that needs to be done for a separate /home partition that I don't know about.

You'll want to get rid of the original ubuntu partitions otherwise you may boot into them by mistake or by default not to mention making grub confusing as to which / and which /home you're using.

Either way you'll need to reinstall grub 2.

See the grub 2 guide in my sig. below but here's the basics

Using Ubuntu 9.10 livecd
Here assuming the Ubuntu partition is sda8,and /boot partition is sda6 (if you have a separate /boot partition).

Boot up ubuntu from the livecd,open terminal and run:

sudo -i
To find out your partitions run

fdisk -l
Use that info for the following

mount /dev/sda8 /mnt

mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/boot #skip this one if not have a separate /boot partition
You'll want to install grub to the drive that is first in the boot order in the BIOS

grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda
Reboot removing the livecd in the process and once you're back in ubuntu run

sudo update-grub
It will automatically find your win 7 and add it to the grub list.

[Mercury_Alpha]

Thanks for the quick and informative reply. I should have also added that I plan to remove the old drive, which is currently listed as SDA and is an old PATA. The drive I want to move everything to is listed as SDC is a SATA drive. I already have another SATA drive previously installed and listed as SDB, so I'm using 2 of 2 SATA connectors on my motherboard, an ASUS P4P800SE.

So I imagine that after I've cloned to SDC, I should shut down the computer, remove the old drive, boot up the Clonzilla LiveCD, and follow those terminal instructions you listed? Or do I need to remove SDB to get my new drive recognized as SDA?

[oldfred]

It may depend on how you have them plugged in. One my machine the three SATA drives seem to be based on the order plugged into the ports - i.e. port 1 is sda etc. I have seen where then the PATA drives get promoted to be in front of the SATA. If your drives get renumbered any grub or fstab entries that use sda will have to be changed or go back and change port plugged into. If you clone drive UUIDs should be copied and be ok, but if you just copy they may change also. Just be ready to update grub and fstab afterwards.