[Gllug] repeat soft noise from hard drive

[James Hawtin]

When using dd you only need your replacement hard disk to be larger than the
current one, drives are so large thesese days they use LBA addressing and
that has nothing to do with the number of physical platters in the drives.

One thing to also get is the size of your hard drive (physically) I notice
in your description you say 2.5, that might mean a 2.5 inch drive, most
normal drives are 3.5. 

Personally I aways build a new set of files systems on the new drive and tar
things across that way I am not copying any directory corruption, and have a
statically linked version of tar for bootstrapping onto a new drive as i do
the copy chrooted, and generally do it one filesystem at a time.

One useful trick when copying from old hard drives is to mount the old drive
read old! As its normally best to use tar preserving absolute paths, to
make sure links come out correctly. 

cd /old ; tar -cPpSslf - . | chroot /new star -xvPpSslf -

if you want to do it using relative paths.

cd /old ; tar -cpSslf - . | ( cd /new ; tar -xvpSslf - )

Remove the l if you want to the whole heirachy in one go.

If your drive is corrupted, I suggest you get drive better than the current
one create big file system on it then use dd_rescue to copy the partitions
off the drive, if you log the failed sectors you can write a script to
retry. Once you have the data on a good drive, you can use fsck etc on the
files and mount them loop back, doing an fsck on a bad drive and make things
alot worse.

Having said all of that your drive might not be booting because grub/lilo
was not correctly installed on the drive. 

James
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