Moving /boot and a Volume Group (root / and swap) to new disk

I was trying to move /boot, / and swap to a smaller disk. Yes, a SMALLER disk. My private server is with a Fedora 6 system on a 80G disk, but it only occupies 2.78 GB. My data files are on other disks. So I decided to use a 40G disk to replace this 80G disk before I upgraded this server to Fedora 8. While I was writing this post, the server has been successfully upgraded, it is doing first time yum update.

Warning: Use this at your own risk.

You may only damage the new disk if you do something wrong, the old one should still work.

The old disk

Original system disk is on /dev/hda, the partitions look like

Disk /dev/hda: 82.3 GB, 82348277760 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 10011 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1          13      104391   83  Linux
/dev/hda2              14       10011    80308935   8e  Linux LVM

initng – Next Generation init System

initng is quite fast, but it has some problems on my computer. hald and 4 other daemons, services or drivers fail. Those could be fixed, but I rather don’t fix them on my own. So, I won’t use initng again in recent time. By Bootchart‘s calculations, init (left image) takes 79 seconds to boot; initng (right image) takes only 28 seconds.

Install

Turn off GRUB splash and Red Hat Graphical Boot (RHGB)

To me, these two graphical modes are fancy, but useless. I prefer simple text mode. If you want to turn them off and you use Fedora 7, you can take the steps:

GRUB splash

Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, Comment splashimage out:
#splashimage=(hd0,4)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

RHGB

Edit /etc/sysconfig/init, Set:
GRAPHICAL=no