Migrating hardware

[bojinov]

Guys,

I need help. I have this Intel board with single xeon (pentium4 based). But I need it, so I've decided to move the existing FreeBSD 8.2 installation to another machine. The other machine is a desktop machine I have with Asus MB and P4 CPU. Probably the biggest mistake I made while configuring the server was installing FreeBSD on a RAID0 array. Now I need the hard drives as well.

I do not want to start from scratch. All is backed up, but I only have a single hard drive for the new machine.

Do you think it is mission impossible? Is there any way this will work without configuring the whole thing all over again?

 

[wblock@]

Boot an 8.2 install CD on the new system. Do a minimal install. Use dump(8) and restore(8) to dump the old computer's partitions and restore over the new one. Backup Options For FreeBSD shows examples.

 

[bojinov]

Thanks a lot. I shall try this. It makes sense. I was doing offline backups using clonezilla of both drives. It never occurred to me I can back up a live system.

Thanks again.

 

[wblock@]

Another option is booting a livefs like mfsBSD to run the backup without mounting the partitions.