How to replace a hard drive...

[Burhan Hanoglu]

Hi Peter,

You can boot the computer with a bootable distro CD and then reinstall Grub on the new disk. Make sure it is connected internally.

For the first question; I learned the hard way that I should never trust such a disk. At least; make you have a good backup.

Regards,
Burhan

--- On Wed, 5/4/11, Peter King <peter.king-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> From: Peter King <peter.king-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org>
> Subject: [TLUG]: How to replace a hard drive...
> To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
> Received: Wednesday, May 4, 2011, 6:25 PM
> A little while ago I had a Western
> Digital Caviar Black drive that was throwing
> bad sector errors. On the view that storage is cheap and
> reliability is crucial,
> I replaced it with a fresh shiny new hard disk (a 1TB
> Seagate Barracuda), and one
> way or another managed to restore all the data that was on
> the damaged disk.
> 
> This left me with the WD disk. So I tried reformatting it,
> which should lock out the
> bad sectors. That seems to work: once reformatted, it
> passes fsck with no problem,
> and it has fast access times.
> 
> Here's the first question. Can I trust this drive now?
> 
>   (I'm inclined to think the answer should be no, on
> the grounds that once a drive
>    goes bad it should never be trusted
> again. But more experienced hands should
>    tell me what they think.)
> 
> One thing I noticed while fooling around with the drives is
> that my root partition
> is on what nowadays counts as a low-capacity drive (a
> "mere" 320GB). So I thought
> I'd find out how easy or hard it would be to transfer it to
> a new and larger hard
> drive.
> 
> So the first thing I tried was to dd everything (including
> the MBR) over to a new
> drive, and then to resize the root partition on the new
> disk with GParted. No go. 
> GParted wouldn't do it, claiming that things didn't end on
> cylinder boundaries and 
> that was over. It reminded me why I strongly prefer
> command-line tools.
> 
> The second thing I tried was to simply partition the new
> drive along the lines of
> the way the old drive was partitioned (namely a boot
> partition, swap partition, root 
> partition) using all of the new disk, and, once the
> partitions are properly formatted,
> then transfer the files on the boot/root partitions using,
> let's see if I have this
> right,
> 
>     find . -xdev | cpio <destination> 
>     
> from the source. That worked. Then I tried to copy over the
> boot sectors of the MBR
> without copying the partition table, using:
> 
>     dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=446 count=1
> 
> But on boot, I just get GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB... endlessly
> filling the screen. Drat.
> Now I confess I cheated; I tried to boot from the new disk
> "in place" attached via
> USB, rather than physically replacing the old boot/root
> disk, and perhaps that's
> the problem. (Note: I don't see why, since if the drive
> address is wrong GRUB should
> just give me a standard failure, like "no kernel detected"
> or the like.) The struggle
> is, well, ongoing.
> 
> So here's the second question. Is there a more
> sensible/straightforward way to reproduce
> one disk onto another of larger size?
> 
> -- 
> Peter King       
>          peter.king-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
> Department of Philosophy
> 170 St. George Street #521
> The University of Toronto   
>         (416)-978-4951 ofc
> Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
>        CANADA
> 
> http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/
> 
> =========================================================================
> GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC  36F5
> 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42)
> gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42
> 
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