looking for linux experts, part 2

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 05:15:11PM -0500, ted leslie wrote:
> what type of high speed do you have?
> 
> 100MB could be reduced to 15-20 MB even with zip.
> 
> I have 70kb/s up from my cable internet, so thats almost 1 meg every 2 minutes,
> 
> you can by a 512MB usb key from you local future shop for 60$?
> or atleast a 256 for under that,
> the suse you have does recognize that right away,
> so just move your stuff to a usb key,
> its very valuable and cheap to have a usb flash RAM storage in this day and age.
> i would recommend you get one regardless, its great for backup.

Or you can get a 250G drive for a bit over $100 and just dd the entire
old drive's partition to a partition on the new drive and do your repair
work on the copy should there be any need to repair the filesystem to
read it.  Smaller disks cost a bit less.

Using an internet connection is dreadfully slow compared to a disk to
disk copy, and with a disk about to fail, you don't have infinite time.

Basic steps:

Install new disk on secondary controller
boot from livecd
cfdisk the new drive (hdc if master on second cable, hdd if slave, sd? if sata
drive)
mkfs the partition you just made.  I like mke2fs -j (for ext3) myself. 
mount new partition somewhere like /mnt/new (might have to mkdir) with
mount -t ext3 (or whichever) /dev/partition /mnt/new
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/new/hda1.img conv=noerror bs=128k

repeat dd for each partition.  You can later mount those images using
mount -o loop -t filesystemtype imagefilename /mountpoint, and then read
the data from them, or run fsck on those images after making a fresh
copy to experiment on.  

Running fsck on a breaking disk is pretty close to data suicide,
especially with reiserfs which is hardly known for having a reliable fsck.
Lovely filesystem, until something goes wrong, then the complexity hurts
a lot.

Lennart Sorensen
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