Marty, Alan, and Damon,
Thanks a lot for all your suggestions! The RAID route looks quite
good and I am going to try it. I'll get back to the list as soon
as I have first results.
Regards,
Kaspar
On Sep 4, 2006, at 7:07 PM, Damon L. Chesser wrote:
Damon L. Chesser wrote:
Alan Chandler wrote:
On Sunday 03 September 2006 23:23, Marty wrote:
Marty wrote:
Kaspar Fischer wrote:
Hi list,
I need to replace my boot disk as it starts failing (with bad
blocks).
What is the easiest way to obtain, on a new harddrive (at
least as
large as the old one), an exact copy of the root file system and
swap partition?
Never touch a running system -- so my intention is to *copy* the
drive instead of installing a new Debian system.
Thanks and regards,
Kaspar
If for example you have two identical hard drives /dev/hda and
/dev/hdb, with your root partition on /dev/hda, and you don't have
any bad blocks on either drive, then you can make a perfect
sector-
-by-sector mirror using "cp /dev/hda /dev/hdb"
Addendum: I posted in haste. Having re-read your message, since
your
case involves both bad blocks and non-identical drives, I would
probably
opt for rsync as described below after manually setting up the
partitions
on the target drive.
One other suggestion. If, before you make the copy you set up
the new drive as a single element of a raid 1 raid array, then
replace the failing disk and add the replacement in as the second
element to this array, you will then have a permanent hot standby
system.
That is something I have just done, although I have a separate
boot partition, and you have to independently store the boot
block on to both drives (I use grub - which is very easy).
There is some good articles on the web with step by step
instructions - I can't locate them right now, but a bit of
googling will find them
I have one such how to at www.damtek.com the direct url is http://
www.damtek.com/2006/05/raid-and-boot-dir_07.html I wrote is
specifically for helping me learn RHEL, but it works for Debian
AFAIK. It will certainly walk you through duplication the grub
MBR, so that you will boot even if you loose the HD that currently
holds your MBR (assuming that /boot and your MBR are both on the
same partition, ie NOT a dual boot system with windows on the
first partition). I hope that will help.
Addendum:
In the OP's case, just make sure you do not make the failing HD
part of a raid, you will loose all your data! If you go this
route, like the above poster said, make the new HD a raid1, only
one member and then copy the old HD data onto it. Just trying to
be extra careful with someone else's data and avoid any
misunderstanding.
--
Damon L. Chesser
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