[CentOS] A questiong about replacing my failing drive

[Maciej Żenczykowski]

> A>  Make bootable floppy
> B>  Start in single user mode
> C>  Create same partition structure on hew drive
> D>  Move all files from old partitions to new partitions
> E>  Switch drives
> F>  Boot off floppy, mount, reinstall grub and boot manager on new drive
> G>  Profit!

well if you want a real quick'n'dirty way to do it then you can simply 
turn off the computer, hook up the drive, boot with kernel command line 
init=/bin/bash, watch the messages for info on what device name the new 
drive got and do "/bin/dd if=/dev/hd{source} of=/dev/hd{target} 
bs=1048576", once it completes do "/bin/sync" and powerdown, remove the 
old disk and hook up the new disk in it's place and reboot and usually 
everything works normally.  [it does screw up drive geometry but since 
linux uses LBA adressing anyway this is irrelevant]

if there are read errors on the source drive you'll probably want to use 
dd_rescue instead of dd.