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Hello,
Symptoms suggest that my current laptop hard drive is on
the way out. It might be other hardware in my laptop, but
for the moment I'm going to suppose it's a dying drive.
I was able to copy data from one drive to a new one as
follows. I'm assuming you have access to both drives simultaneously
(although strictly speaking I don't think that's required).
In my case, I have an external hard drive housing that holds 2.5"
drives; I left the old drive inside the laptop. An advantage to
the approach below is that the drives can be of different sizes.
[There are probably tools to do this, but this was fairly satisfying.]
1) Boot in Knoppix [1]. I chose knoppix 3.4 (most recent as of
this posting), put it on a CD, etc.
Note: I booted up into the 2.6 kernel by typing "knoppix26"
at the boot prompt. I don't know whether using this kernel
was critical to the success of the transfer.
2) Partition the new drive using sizes proportional to the old
drive. I used cfdisk. In my case, the drives were both 40G.
3) For each partition on the old drive, mount the corresponding =20
partition on the new drive. Use rsync (-av) to copy data=20
from old to new. I do not think "dd" is a good idea since
I did not want the process to be sensitive to absolute =20
addresses. I'm sure something besides rsync (cpio?) would=20
work as well.
I did have some problems here copying my one windows NTFS=20
partition. I have not yet tested whether I can boot into=20
Windows XP using the new drive. This part requires more study.
4) The next bit was a stumbling block due to lvm2. I was
getting error messages related to "/dev/mapper/control" as
soon as I tried to run lilo on the new disk. The lvm2 FAQ [2]
suggested a solution that involved loading a module that=20
didn't seem to be loaded in Knoppix 3.4 automatically. So,
by hand a ran "/etc/init.d/libdevmapper1.00 start" and the
rest of the steps worked fine. Without it, lilo would not
complete properly.
5) Make the (mounted) root partition on the new drive the=20
active root with chroot. In my case: "chroot /mnt/hda2".
6) Run lilo using that root.
After that I was able to remove the knoppix CD and reboot
using the new harddrive. I didn't see any irregularities
and I'm writing to you know using the new drive.
I'll probably keep the old one around, or I might ask for
a refund since I bought the disk is flaking out in March of
this year [3]. The fact that it's only lasted a bit more
than three months makes me a bit suspicious that this is
not a hard drive problem.=20
- Ian
[1]
http://www.knoppix.net/
[2]
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/lvm2faq.html#AEN241
[3]
http://impressive.net/archives/fogo/1078859157.3263.21.camel@seabright
--=20
Ian Jacobs (
[email protected])
http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel: +1 718 260-9447
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