Jacques B. wrote:
On 8/13/07, Karl Larsen <k5di@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:I discovered I can buy a new IDE 160 GB Western Digital Hard Drive for $83.00 plus shipping. I would like to replace this old 160 GB with a new one. What method would you suggest for putting all the stuff on the old hard drive on this new one? It seems that dd could do it but I wonder how fast it would be? Any experience will be appreciated. -- Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI Linux User #450462 http://counter.li.org.Just a thought, but if your current drive works fine and you are buying another of identical size, can you set it up as RAID 1 so that the old drive will mirror onto the new one? Sounds like you want to retire the old one and bring in a new one of the same size. RAID 1 will give you the peace of mind of having that new drive PLUS having your data mirrored onto two drives. I've only dealt with hardware RAIDs so not sure (without Googling it) how you'd set that up in the meantime. If it can be set up to mirror the current drive onto the new one at configuration time and then carry on from there you'd have no backing up at all to do. The software RAID would take care of doing it for you.
You can do that, but it is difficult if possible at all to convert an existing filesystem to raid1 and there would be a small performance hit if you plug both IDE drives into the same cable. The straightforward approach would probably be to create the raid on the new drive, specifying the other member as 'missing', copy everything over and adjust fstab and grub.conf to use it, then add the old drive and let it sync. Geeks.com has a refurbished 160gig that might last as long as the rest of the computer for under $50.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
