Changing To Different Hard Drive Size

[Deloy Johnson]

With new and larger hard drives coming on the market almost daily the
situation of upgrading to a larger drive has been occuring more and 
more often.  
My question is :  Is there an easy way to transfer your entire system (dump)
backup onto the larger hard disk or must you use "tar" to backup any necessary 
files and then go through the tedious process of putting your operating system 
back together from the distribution disks.  

Another situation is where a hard drive fails and the replacement disk is
larger than the original -- Can you use an archive type backup tape to
restore and still make use of the entire disk?

I am currently using an Altos 386 Series 2000 running Xenix System V/386.
In the Altos "restore" script it reads the file system size (and swap size)
from the dump tape.  It then uses these numbers as parameters to "mkfs".
Can I override the numbers it gets off the tape and specify a bigger
filesystem, and if so will the operating system use the space that the 
tape doesn't fill?  I guess I'm not exactly sure what the recover program
does at it's lowest level.

Any answers or suggestions???

DPJ