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I'd like to transfer my Fedora to a remote machine. Fedora is under Grub 2.0 and on the remote machine there is a Centos system and Grub 0.97. In fact, I have two questions.

First is how to properly add an entry to the hosting grub. The second one is how to copy Fedora filesystem to the machine on which Centos is running. Fedora's lsblk output is: 

sda                      8:0    0 232.9G  0 disk 
├─sda1                   8:1    0   500M  0 part /boot
└─sda2                   8:2    0 231.8G  0 part 
  ├─fedora-usr (dm-0)  253:0    0  14.7G  0 lvm  /usr
  ├─fedora-swap (dm-1) 253:1    0     4G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
  ├─fedora-root (dm-2) 253:2    0  30.5G  0 lvm  /
  ├─fedora-tmp (dm-3)  253:3    0     4G  0 lvm  /tmp
  └─fedora-home (dm-4) 253:4    0 178.7G  0 lvm  /home

How could I add this structure to the remote machine while keeping the existing Centos partition schema? 

├─sda1                         8:1    0    25G  0 part 
├─sda2                         8:2    0 279.5G  0 part 
├─sda3                         8:3    0 198.9G  0 part 
├─sda4                         8:4    0     1K  0 part 
├─sda5                         8:5    0   500M  0 part /boot
└─sda6                         8:6    0 194.8G  0 part 
  ├─vg_centos-lv_root (dm-0) 253:0    0    50G  0 lvm  /
  ├─vg_centos-lv_swap (dm-1) 253:1    0   3.8G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
  └─vg_centos-lv_home (dm-2) 253:2    0   141G  0 lvm  /home

Can I add /dev/sda7 and so on?

UPD#1 the both systems aren't RAID disk the both have lvm disks and the master boot is MBR not GPT

slm
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Yurij73
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    Are you asking how would make the Fedora system part of the CentOS system so that you could dual boot them on the CentOS system? – slm May 03 '13 at 16:11
  • Yes, this is my case, i would like a boot option – Yurij73 May 03 '13 at 17:10
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    if the business is to complex may be a virtualization is a good solution? – Yurij73 May 03 '13 at 17:13
  • Absolutely, I didn't want to confuse the Q&A here but I would definitely go that route. There are various ways to take a system and convert it fairly easily to a virtual machine. It's typically called P2V or physical to virtual. But that's a different question 8-). I've done this many times over the years, it's fairly painless once you understand how to do it. – slm May 03 '13 at 17:17

2 Answers2

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If there is enough space left on your disk, you can add a new partition to your remote machine's disk. A tool like gparted for example will allow you to resize existing partitions to free the space you need. You don't need to create another /boot partition. You can merge the one on your computer and the one on your remote machine. It will be a lot easier to configure grub this way.

Is your Fedora system heavily customised? If I were you, I wouldn't copy the entire system, but only the /home partition and I would reinstall a system on the new host. It can be very tricky to copy a system which hadn't been designed for (like a virtual machine can be for example). For example, you'd have to review entirely your /etc/fstab, make sure all the firmwares you need are available for your new material...

If you know what you're doing, you'll have to recreate the LVM schema and then copy your data.

lgeorget
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Not sure what you're ultimately after by doing this but I would probably recommend not attempting to do this. Moving a system from one set of hardware to another can be problematic and is usually a task reserved for the most skilled in dealing with Linux.

Hardware differences

For starters you have to make sure that both systems have the same type of hardware architecture.

  • Are they both Intel sytems? AMD systems?
  • Are they 32-bit or 64-bit systems?
  • Graphics cards the same?
  • Networking and other hardware?

Re-configuring this hardware can be problematic after a system has been installed.

Disk partitioning differences

Disk layouts can be even trickier to replicate from one system to the next. There are several technologies that you have to be familiar with.

  • Is the drive formatted using MBR (Master Boot Record) vs. GPT (GUID Partitioning Table)?
  • Do the drives contain a software RAID (mdadm)?
  • Do they contain a LVM (logical volume management) layer?

In general I would recommend collecting the files from the /etc and /home directories, doing a re-installation of the OS on the actual hardware you're interested in moving it to, and re-applying the configurations post-installation.

slm
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  • Moving or cloning a Linux installation to another machine isn't very difficult. See e.g. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/2865/moving-linux-install-to-a-new-computer – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' May 03 '13 at 23:09
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    @Gilles, I've done the same myself in lift a OS from one physical box to another. This question is slightly different in the sense that for one, he's trying to mash an existing system into another and make it a dual boot, and two, he's trying to replicate the HDD topology of the Fedora system into the CentOS system. To do this would require expertise in several disk utilities that most people just aren't going to be able to deal with. Just my $0.02. – slm May 03 '13 at 23:20