SOLVED - Reinstall Arch on new thumb drive

Question

Hello all, I'm a noob to Linux, but not afraid of command lines (old school dos guy).  I bought a pogoplug on a whim and installed using these instructions: http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv5 … 2-pinkgray but I would like to reinstall arch on a new faster thumb drive and start over.  My question is how to go about this (I did google it too).  I would like to avoid bricking the pogo.  This is my thinking:
sda is the current slow, small, old thumbdrive, i plug in my new drive it would be sdb right?
My pass at the reinstall:
Start fdisk on the USB drive:
/sbin/fdisk /dev/sdb
At the fdisk prompt, delete old partitions and create a new one:
Type o. This will clear out any partitions on the drive.
Type p to list partitions. There should be no partitions left.
Now type n, then p for primary, 1 for the first partition on the drive, and then press ENTER, accepting default values.
Exit by typing w.
Now create the ext2 filesystem:
wget http://archlinuxarm.org/os/pogoplug/mke2fs
chmod 755 mke2fs
./mke2fs /dev/sdb1
mkdir usb
mount /dev/sdb1 usb
Download and install Arch Linux ARM:
cd usb
wget http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM … est.tar.gz
tar -xzvf ArchLinuxARM-armv5te-*.tar.gz  # This will take a long time
rm ArchLinuxARM-armv5te-*.tar.gz
sync  # Takes a while when using a flash drive
Clean up, reboot, remove old thumb drive. Cross your fingers and hope for the best.
cd ..
umount usb
/sbin/reboot
Once powered down, pull old thumb drive
The SSH key of your device will be different, so you need to tell Mac OS X or Linux to remove it from ~/.ssh/known_hosts before using SSH again:
ssh-keygen -R 192.168.1.123 # Use your device's IP
Log back in after your Pogoplug reboots using username root and password root.
*whew* so am I missing a step?  Will the bootloader balk at the new drive?
Thanks in advance
Last edited by ubermacin (2013-01-20 04:36:58)

Answer 1

Not sure. But I think they are images and system tar in your link.
For images I would use dd (as say Ŝaran and later resize). You write all the system in the thumb drive and get a bootloader.
The second (systema tar), you get all files but you don't get bootloader.
You can do, too, what Ŝaran say. Do an image of your current system with dd. It's like clonning. Later resize your filesystem.
dd if=old_thumb_drive of=new_thumb_drive bs=4M
(from a third system)
Beware with dd and /dev/ (same people say that it stands for data destroyer)
*bs=4M is, generally, the block size of thumbdrives. So it takes less time to write.
Last edited by Alber (2013-01-19 10:35:34)