crashing hard drive

[Raul A. Gallegos]

Hi gang. Currently I'm running FC3 on a machine which has 2 hard drives. 
Both are 40gb. the first hd is the root /usr/local and /var partitions 
while the second one is all 40gb of /home.

It appears that the hard drive is about to crash because I'm starting to 
get unreadable hda errors some give a sector it cannot read others say 
unknown errors. In any case the system is not acting right and the hdd 
is kind of old.

So now to my question. If I get another 40gb hdd which I do have one of. 
Can I simply transfer the stuff from the one to the other either by 
using tar saving all permissions? Or should I reinstall the os on the 
new hdd and just redo all my settings.

Right now the mail system I use is vpostmaster which is a combo of 
postgres for the mail, spam, user accounts, passwords, etc and it puts 
all it's maildir mail in /var/spool/vpostmaster. If I reinstall the 
whole os I can easily save that directory not losing mail but I'd have 
to recreate the accounts after reinstalling vpostmaster.

I'm fine in doing this because if I needed to I could use another os or 
a new Fedora. But in case I do stick with FC3 will simply transferring 
all the hard drive stuff work?

Thanks.

-- 
Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.
Raul A. Gallegos ... IliwSsmc