Re: [gentoo-user] Is my hard drive sick?

[Mick]

On Thursday 22 November 2007, brullo nulla wrote:
> > > But I was thinking: if my old drive is 200 Gb and my new drive is 320
> > > Gb, what happens to the partition table? That is, the old partition
> > > table will refer to a 200 Gb disk, on a 320 Gb disk. What happens to
> > > the 120 Gb left? Are they recognized as an empty partition? Are they
> > > left unrecognized?
> > >
> > > Maybe I should just dd the MBR and then repartition the disk and use cp
> > > for the rest.
> >
> > You'll need to fdisk it with a LiveCD and delete the old small partition,
> > then create a new one in its place occupying the rest of the new larger
> > disk.  *BE VERY CAREFUL* to start the new partition *exactly* where the
> > old one starts. Finally, reboot (to read the new partition table) and
> > resize the fs  to fit the expanded available physical space.
>
> Hmm. Guess I'll just dd the 512-mb grub bootloader and then proceed by
> copying everything in new partitions, all from a livecd.

It's your call of course, but why don't you just boot from a LiveCD, mount the 
lot and tar the contents of the suspect disk to the new disk/partitions?  The 
size of the new disk and partitions can be anything you like, as long as they 
are not smaller than the amount of data you are trying to tar into them.  
Then you can run grub from the LiveCD to install the grub boot code in the 
MBR of the new disk.  Other than the time it'll take you to partition the new 
disk (and reboot), tar should run faster than dd (it will not be copying over 
empty space) and it will be essentially defraging your data onto the new 
partition.  You may find that emerge sync runs faster than it used to.

The only reason that I would image a drive/partition with dd is if I had some 
fs corruption and wanted to try offline to fix it.

Anyway, just my 2c's.

HTH.
-- 
Regards,
Mick