Replacing a linux hard drive...

My Linux drive (2ndary master IDE currently) has decided to stop working. I get i/o errors all the time and it often freezes during the hard drive detection on boot. It needs to be replaced before it completely craps out on me.

It is set up currently with /boot, /, and /swap partitions.

I have purchased a new Maxtor ATA133 160 GB HD and would like to just move the data from one to the other. The new one is much larger (old drive was like 16 GB).

Is there an easy way to do this? I really don't want to have to reinstall linux from ground 0 and lose everything I've done.

Just boot from a Knoppix CD, partition/format/mount the new drive, mount the old one and do cp -a /mnt/olddrive /mnt/newdrive for each partition on the old drive.

or, buy ghost and ghost it over. make sure that you do NOT change the partition sizes when ghosting Linux. It seems to fail everytime I change the partition sizes (only with Linux though)

It can also be done with tar (with a -p option) or dd. I think dd will even copy the boot sector so you won't have to reinstall your bootloader.

engjohn said:

or, buy ghost and ghost it over. make sure that you do NOT change the partition sizes when ghosting Linux. It seems to fail everytime I change the partition sizes (only with Linux though)

Click to expand...

I'll second that, Ghost 2k4 destroyed my slack install a few weeks ago.