What is the most practical method to replace the hard drive?
Install another drive (same size or larger), boot from CD in rescue
mode and use the dd utility to copy the old drive image to the new
disk (example: dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb). However, the failing
hardware could make this problematic. Then remove the dying disk and
install the new disk on the cable where the old disk was so that the
new disk is now /dev/hda.
Tried this, I should have been more clear above. When I access certain
sectors the machine reboots.
Just to confirm: you mean the machine reboots even when this disk is not
a system disk? Suppose you mount it readonly (maybe it's doing atime
updates unsuccessfully?)?
If it's a peculiarity of the controller, you could try putting it in as
a data disk in another machine with a different kind of disk controller.
You could even put it in a Windows box and use one the various free
utilities to look at the Linux filesystem - perhaps that would not
exercise whatever issue is causing the reboots.
If you've gotten the vital data off and any customizations out of /etc,
the crontabs, etc., then if possible, maybe you could just do an
"rpm -q -a" to get the current package list, and then diff that against
the list you get on a fresh install to figure out what you need to add.
Dan
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