[Sussex] failing hard drive - how do I boot the replacement ?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

John D. wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> Current hdd seems to be failing (loud squealing noise>GUI stops>root partition 
> errors listed in console login).
>
> So I've managed (with lots of assistance from Dave C) get another one 
> installed, and by using the Gparted live CD copy the data from the old drive 
> to the new one (plus expand the partitions on the new one as it's larger than 
> the old one).
>
> The problem seems to be grub. All the files seem to be copied over but the new 
> drive (now /dev/hda) won't boot. If I try grub-install from the old drive and 
> tell it to install to the new drive, it says that /dev/hdb1 has no matching 
> BIOS drive (I've no idea what that means as the hard drives seem to show up 
> on the initial BIOS screen), if I change the BIOS setting for the system to 
> boot from the first drive (i.e. hdd -0 rather than -1 presuming that -0 is 
> the new hda drive and -1 is the older, now hdb drive), I get lines/columns of 
> GRUB (full screen).
>   
What? OK, why are you grub-installing from the old drive when you want 
to use the new drive?

BTW, I tremendously dislike the "enlarge partitions" tools. I'm a big 
believer in "make a new partition, then use rsync or 'cp -a' to copy the 
old partition to the new partition" approach to the universe. It's 
typically one hell of a lot faster and doesn't bother copying blocks you 
don't care about.

The BIOS drive part is fairly confusing: what does your 
/boot/grub/device.map say? And what does "fdisk -l" say?

Swapping the drives in the BIOS is.... an adventure. You must edit or 
reset /boot/grub/device.map and /etc/fstab to deal with the change, or 
use some of the more interesting and never-properly-documented options 
to cope, for both grub and LILO.
> If I try to force things one way or another by disconnecting the older hard 
> drive - I get told that theres a boot disk failure and to insert a system 
> disk and hit enter.
>
> Having looked at the obvious places for info on how this might be achieved I'm 
> getting no where.
>
> Can anyone explain how I might sort this ? Or point me toward idiot proof 
> instructions somewhere ?
>
> regards
>   
Yank the second drive, make sure your new drive is /dev/hda (first IDE 
controller, master) and use a live CD to poke around and edit 
appropriately. Do *NOT* use the "L:ABEL=/" settings in your /etc/fstab, 
because your old and new drives may both have partitions labeled this 
way after using various partiton copying tools.