crashing hard drive

[Joseph C. Lininger]

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Hello,
To answer your question, most likely you can just use tar to backup the
system and then use it again on the new drive. Don't do this while the
system is running though or weird things will happen. There are two
cases when you won't be able to simply use tar:

1. If you are using extended attributes/acl's on the filesystem, or
2. If you are using some sort of program that uses inode numbers for
accessing stuff. (mail system would be the culprit here if anything)

In either case, you wanna use something like dump or xfsdump or similar
tools that will preserve that stuff. But most likely you can just tar
with the understanding that you may have to fix up your mail queue
afterwords. No matter how you do it, make sure to use a cd to do it. Do
not tar up or dump a running system.

- --
It's not one damn thing after another, it's the same damn thing over and
over. (History repeats itself)
Joseph C. Lininger
Oh alright, here's the *actual* signature...

And so it came to pass that on Sat, 10 Jun 2006, Raul A. Gallegos said

> 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.
>
>


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