Re: Backing up harddisk prior to failure
High,
On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Jonathan Matthews wrote:
> Hi all
>
> My server's harddisk is making weird noises and telling me at the
> console that various things went wrong.
> All in all, I reckon the drive is about to die.
>
> How would people go about transferring the whole system (dpkg details
> and all) over to another disk (which I'm just about to buy) and then
> removing the faulty one?
> I've got no problem with putting the two disks in concurrently, but I'm
> not sure how to go about moving it all, short of bzipping each partition
> up. Even then, would that actually guarantee a working system?
>
> As an aside, I'd also be interested in any suggestions for drive
> makes/models around the 10+gig mark that are competitively priced. Uk
> specific if poss, Oxford specific even better :-)
> It's to go in a P133, IDE system - nothing fancy here!
>
Get that harddisk as soon as possible. Since you have to turn off the
computer anyway, do it now (and risk that the drive drops dead). If
possible, leave the computer on with minimum harddisk usage and find a
network solution.
Then:
The safest way to backup an entire system is with dd:
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mnt/newhd/sda1.img
Do this for each partition (exept swap). There is no quicker and robuuster
way to back it up. All data is copied, no matter what partition type it
was.
Then boot up a rescue disk, mount your new harddisk and then your
partitions:
mount -o loop -t ext2 /mnt/newhd/sda1.img /mnt/oldhd
Now you can copy/move all files safely.
Good luck,
Sebastiaan
Reply to: