How to move FreeBSD to a new hard disk

This article will explain how you can move your FreeBSD installation from one hard disk drive to another. I have done this many times using the dump/restore utility. Before you begin, be sure you have read this document carefully. Let's assume that our FreeBSD installation is on a 4 gigabyte drive (ide master ad0) and we would like to move it to a new 20 gig drive. What you need to do is remove the old hard disk, install the new [20G] drive as an ide master and perform a minimal clean install of FreeBSD, setting up the partitions exactly how you want them. Be se sure to set the drive as bootable and boot from it one time as a test. Next, put your old [4G] drive back in the system as an ide master and the new [20G] drive in as an ide slave. Boot the system on your old installation in single user mode.