[Leaplist] can I clone my hard drive

[Bryan J. Smith]

andrei raevsky wrote:  
> Hi again,
> Judging from my bad blocks problems, it looks like my hard drive
> is dying.  Here are the partitions I have on it:
> /dev/sda1 is my / partition with the system on it
> /dev/sda2 is my /swap partition
> */dev/sda2 is my /home partition with my data on it and this is
> the one I *really* would like to save, if possible*.
> /dev/sdb1 is my /usr partition

There are various ways to dump/restore, cpio (copy I/O), tar/untar,
etc... your filesystem(s), let alone "dd" them (raw sector copy, as
long as select disk geometry matches).  There are also CDs with the
GNU "parted" utility, as well as front-ends, that can copy, move,
resize, etc... various filesystems, including Reiser (although I
think copy/move only, not resize), including on bootable CDs.

> If I purchase another 80GB+ hard drive and if I connect it to
> my IDE cable and then boot with a live-CD, can I 'clone' my old
> drive's data to the new drive and then put the new one in place
> of the old one and boot off it?

Don't purchase.  I've got 40-80GB drives, possibly a pair of 80GB
drives.  If I get a 3Ware 7006-2LP true hardware RAID card (I just
heard back from the eBay seller about buying 15, I'm calling him
later), I can set you up with a RAID-1 configuration.

Unfortunately I live in Oviedo and work in New York, only coming home
on the weekends.  You'd have to catch me this weekend as I'm heading
to the 24 hours of Sebring for 3/15 and the Bahamas 3/22.  I'm sure
you want this done before the next InstallFest.  ;)

I have a spare 3Ware 6200 (2-channel UltraATA mode 4 aka Ultra66) you
can borrow until I get the 3Ware 7006-2LP (2-channel UltraATA mode 6
aka Ultra133) cards in probably sometime next week.  The 3Ware 6200
works fine, it just doesn't have support software that works under
kernel 2.6 (I use one for a kernel 2.4-based IPCop firewall myself,
with 40GB drives no less ;).  It will still work fine though, you
just can't modify things on-the-fly, or use its notification
user-space programs.

> Or will it copy my bad sectors and screw up the ReiserFS's 
> journalling on the new one?
> Do I have to make a ReiserFS on the new one first, or is there
> a way to clone everything, filesystem and data, to the new drive?

You can do either.  We can look at your options.

> How can I best rescue all the partitions of my terminally ill
> hard drive?

Depends on the situation.

I'm more interested in your ATA southbridge and hard drive
combination.  I've seen ATA subsystem changes (especially with the
new libata and device changes) in the kernel royally screw up older
ATA support several times.  It's one of the reasons I stick with
CentOS/RHEL on older hardware.  ;)

Or just throw a 3Ware 7000 series at the problem which removes the
whole ATA stack from the problem.  I.e., the kernel just writes/reads
to/from the 3Ware's non-blocking ASIC and SRAM directly, which then
handles any striping/mirroring internally.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith       Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org  http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith
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       Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution