[mdlug] Flakey hard drive

[R. Kannan]

All,

The drive was readable and so I decided to copy the contents to a new drive (of larger capacity) and start booting from the new drive. This is what I did so far (after booting up in knoppix)

1) Install hardware making the new hard drive master (hda) and the old drive slave (hdb)
2) Create Windows and Linux partitions on the new drive (hda) similar to those on old (hdb)
3) Make 'Windows-C' and /boot partitions bootable

This is what I plan to do (after booting up in knoppix)

4) Copy contents from the partitions in hdb to those in hda. Can I just use a 'cp' command to do this or is it faster with 'dd'? Should I do fsck on the old partitions before I mount/copy?
5) Edit the /etc/fstab file in hda '/' partition to reflect the new partition locations
6) Edit '/boot/grub/menu.lst' in hda '/boot' partition to reflect new locations of bootable partitions
7) Install grub on MBR of hda and reboot (See Carl T Miller's note earlier this month to the list).

Is there anything else I need to be doing or be careful about?

Thanks in advance for your help.


-----Original Message-----
>From: "R. Kannan" <rkannan at peoplepc.com>
>Sent: Aug 7, 2007 9:38 AM
>To: MDLUG's Main discussion list <mdlug at mdlug.org>
>Subject: Re: [mdlug] Flakey had drive
>
>Thanks for all those who replied (and thanks Rich for fixing the mail server and open up the floodgates). I will try some of the suggestions this week and report back.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>>From: "Carl T. Miller" <millerc at cantonpl.org>
>>Sent: Aug 7, 2007 9:02 AM
>>To: MDLUG's Main discussion list <mdlug at mdlug.org>
>>Subject: Re: [mdlug] Flakey had drive
>>
>>R. Kannan wrote:
>>> The hard drive on my desktop has become flakey. Sometimes, it boots fine
>>> but fails to access data. When I booted on knoppix CD, noppix recognized
>>> the partitions and set up the fstab file correctly but I could not mount
>>> the partitions.the 'mount' command just hung in there. I tried 'cfdisk'
>>> but it couldnot find the hard disk.
>>>
>>> Is there a way to try and do a fail-safe access just to get at the data
>>> (disable dma etc.)? Any advice is appreciated.
>>
>>I'm not sure what I would do in this situation.  Normally if
>>a hard drive is getting flakey, I'll boot from a Knoppix CD
>>and use dd to make a copy of each partition of the drive.
>>You can then safely experiment with the copies.
>>
>>You may want to run gpart (it's on the Knoppix cd) to see
>>if the guessed partition table matches the partitions found
>>at boot time.  If they don't match, I'd back up the current
>>MBR (not to the same hard drive!), write the new values with
>>gpart and reboot.  It's possible that will fix everything.
>>If not, you can write the old MBR back and it will be just
>>like you found it.
>>
>>c
>>
>>
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>
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