[Gllug] repeat soft noise from hard drive

[Jose Luis Martinez]

2008/12/10 John Hearns <hearnsj at googlemail.com>:
> I know this is an old war story, so apologies in advance for boring
> everyone.
>
> When I worked at St Thomas Hospital I once heard some strange noises coming
> from a Sun workstation disk. As this workstation controlled a brain scanner
> I was a bit concerned. I borrowed a doctors stethescope and proceeded to
> conduct a grand rounds, with this poor Sparcstation as prime patient.
>
> Fair dos to Sun, they dispatched an engineer with a fresh drive. He had a
> good technique for replacing the drive - put the new one in, booted up to
> open firmware and ran a 'dd' from old drive to new drive. Swap new drive
> into place and we're off and running.
> You can do the same drive cloning trick in Linux if you boot off a Knoppix
> CD or USB stick.
> But remember kiddies - this only works if you have two drives of the same
> model (or you are dead certain the drives have the same geometry).
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>

The dd technique was (is?) widely used with Sun's stuff (as you  may
or may not know, they normally support a very precise range of disks
so support tasks are predictable).  I personally installed hundreds of
machines like that, many moons ago I have to add :-)

There is nothing stopping this in Linux, but normally what happens is
that, since there is no nanny company dictating disk sizes supported,
by the time you need to replace a disk the ones available are much
bigger and you are unlikely to find one identical to the one close to
collapsing, snd most likely you won't want to anyway.
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