Re: replacing hard disk

[Tony Baldwin <photodharma@gmail.com>]

Jan Willem Stumpel wrote:
> My wife's computer which runs ubuntu "heron" made a funny sound
> today. I now think it must have come from the hard disk, which is
> quite old; the motherboard and cpu are fairly new, however. And
> just now the computer became unusable because it could no longer
> save any files. /var/log/syslog told about a disk error which
> resulted in the disk being remounted read-only. Restarting the
> computer caused an fsck, and now the machine works again, but it
> is clear that the disk is nearing the end of its life.
>
> So tomorrow it's off to the computer shop to get a new hard disk.
>
> Are there any tips on moving the whole system from the old disk to
> the new one? Or do I just have to re-install ubuntu, re-install
> any updates and extra programs which are installed, find and copy
> modified config files, mails, bookmarks, etc?
>
> Regards, Jan

You should probably be asking this question on the Ubuntu list.
Nonetheless, you could use livemagic and livehelper, both available in 
the ubuntu repos, to my knowledge (at least, I'm pretty sure they're 
available to jaunty, not sure about hardy), to make a livecd iso of the 
existing system, from which you could install to a new disk.

do
apt-cache search livemagic
to be for sure
or just
aptitude install livehelper
which should install livemagic and livehelper
livehelper being a gui frontend for livemagic

You should, of course, back up all data/documents/music etc. to another 
disk before doing any of that stuff.

/tony

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