On Sat, 24 Nov 2012 13:17:12 +0000, [email protected] said: > What's my best way forward from here? When I've swapped disks, can I use > dd to write my rescued information to the new hard drive?
Here's how I would do it (so "best" for me; not necessarily "best" for you). Put both disks in system. Boot from favourite rescue CD. Assume /dev/sda is your failing disk and /dev/sdb is the new one. Be CERTAIN of this otherwise you'll lose data. # Replicate the partition table: sfdisk -d /dev/sda|sfdisk /dev/sdb # Make the filesystems on the new disk: for a in 1 3;do mke2fs -t ext4 /dev/sdb$a;done # Make the swap partition: mkswap /dev/sdb5 # Create two mount points: mkdir /to /from # Mount the first pair of partitions mount -r /dev/sda1 /from mount /dev/sdb1 /to # Copy, preserving metadata tar -C /from -cf -|tar -C /to -xvf - # Unmount umount /to /from # Repeat above to copy all data partition (just root and home in your case) Shut down, remove old disk, leave new disk, boot rescue CD and write boot block. Lots of ways of doing that, some of which are distro-dependent and they will vary depending on whether you're using lilo, grub 1 or grub 2. If you need specific instructions, shout. -- We're looking for smart Linux people: http://www.tiger-computing.co.uk/jobs -- Please post to: [email protected] Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
