Migrating FreeBSD installation from one hard disk drive to another

[nx]

Hi,

I've been trying to use G4U like I have successfully in the past to image a FreeBSD drive, but it keeps failing - giving 'uncorrectable error' with the same fsbn numbers every failed attempt.
I need to use this drive online very soon but need a backup - preferably a full image - before I do so (and the drive is potentially hacked or dies due to hardware error).

It's been a year since I imaged the drive because of circumstances beyond my control (moving residences [too] often), and I don't have time to rebuild a new drive to be the same as this install. I'll get time in the future to do that, but right now I need to get a new image of the drive any way I can, at least by migrating its contents to a new drive - so that I can get it online, make money and update hardware, pay bills...
The FreeBSD install hasn't been crashing, but G4U is failing at the same point after starting to image it, which makes me think that thought fsck reports every partition as clean, it must have some hardware errors.

I found this drive migration howto and started following it:
http://www.bsdguides.org/guides/freebsd/misc/migrate_harddrive.php

But it's very old and uses MAKEDEV, which every doc I find says is now done automatically by FreeBSD since 4.0 or higher. My ver of FreeBSD is 6.2 (until a future update).

This is the part of the howto that I can't follow because MAKEDEV isn't available in 6.2, at least in single user mode, which the howto states to use:

# cd /dev
#./MAKEDEV ad1s1a
#./MAKEDEV ad1s1e
#./MAKEDEV ad1s1f

So... my questions are:

1. how can I manually create a device node like in the howto excerpt above in FreeBSD (single user mode) without MAKEDEV?

2. and if anyone has a mo to look at the link to the howto above (it's shorter than my post) can they suggest a better way to clone the drive either to another drive (my new drive is bigger) or across the network like when using G4U?

3. or have I overlooked a way of using fsck or another tool that could fix the fsbn tn sn etc errors that netbsd reports as being 'uncorrectable' after initially getting G4U to image the drive over the network?

HUGE thanks to anyone who can help - this will help a tiny startup launch (and not fail)!

 

[Matty]

you dont have to create the node. The moment you boot the /dev shows all the devices you have. so check if you have /dev/ad1 or whatever

 

[wblock@]

2. and if anyone has a mo to look at the link to the howto above (it's shorter than my post) can they suggest a better way to clone the drive either to another drive (my new drive is bigger) or across the network like when using G4U?

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/backup-basics.html

The first section shows how to use dump and restore via ssh.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.html#NEW-HUGE-DISK

And that shows the general procedure of using dump/restore to move to a bigger drive.

 

[nx]

Thanks

Thanks!

Matty - thanks, but in the howto I linked to it is necessary to manually create the device nodes in single user mode so partition data can be copied from there.
I know this is normally done automatically in FreeBSD after ver 4 or later.
I wish I could rely on such magic for this howto. Thanks again.

wblock - thanks I had a partial read of those links and being 'time constrained' I caved to using another cloning sys - Clonezilla.
It has successfully imaged the drive with dd and restored it perfectly to another disk - including the super block error in the one partition that caused G4U to fail! LOL

Now I need to post in another forum a question to find an alternative super block.
I've found some but it's still not allowing the partition to mount.

Thanks again to both of you for your help. These forums are awesome!