Dreading the upgrade

I hate upgrading hard drives. Every time I’ve had to migrate data from a dodgy disk something wrong happens.

This weekend I have the challenging task of upgrading my aging Thinkpad’s 30GB hard drive to a new Seagate momentus.

My file system currently looks like:

frodo$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1             6.5G  5.7G  460M  93% /
tmpfs                 380M     0  380M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda6              21G   17G  2.3G  89% /home
tmpfs                  10M   80K   10M   1% /dev

I’m tired of keeping my root system to 6GB. Though although I try my best to avoid bloat, somehow my system is 6GBs. FS.

My home directory is cramped. I hate having to delete movies and episodes because there isn’t enough space.

So getting the hard drive in and out my laptop is easy. Though copying the data probably will have to be through an external usb one case. OMG, that will probably take forever... And what tool do I use? sfdisk? Ideas anyone?

So once copying 30GB over to my new 100GB+ (have not bought it yet) hard drive, how do I grow it so it takes full use of the space? I guess I should be using LVM. Though why on earth doesn’t the Debian Installer use it by default like Red Hat?

I just pray I don’t end up installing my machine from scratch.