[CentOS] A questiong about replacing my failing drive

[Dag Wieers]

On Sat, 11 Jun 2005, Maciej ?enczykowski wrote:

> > 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.

I'd recommend doing the same using ddrescue and would suggest always using 
ddrescue as it provides you with status information (progress, errors, 
...) and doesn't bail out if you get input/output errors.

And if you ever have filesystem errors (if the system wants to use fsck), 
first check if you harddisk is not broken. As you don't want to run fsck 
on a broken disk and risk loosing all your data. In that case, first 
ddrescue everything to a new disk, and then perform an fsck.

--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]