Best way to replace a drive with a clone

[Antonio Olivares]

--- On Sat, 7/31/10, Steven Stern <subscribed-lists at sterndata.com> wrote:

> From: Steven Stern <subscribed-lists at sterndata.com>
> Subject: Best way to replace a drive with a clone
> To: "Community support for Fedora users" <users at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Date: Saturday, July 31, 2010, 10:59 AM
> According to the SMART stats, the
> single drive in my Fedora server is 
> starting to fail.  Rather than backup, do a clean
> install, and rebuild, 
> I'd like to try to clone the existing drive to a new one,
> then swap in 
> the new one.
> 
> What are the restrictions on doing this and the best way to
> accomplish 
> it?  
Best way is subjective :(, There is no "Best way", however there are ways to do it :) 
> I have the Clonezilla Live CD that I use for
> backup.  Will that do 
> it?
>
Clonezilla will do it, provided that the new drive is the same size or bigger :)

The "bad thing" might be?, that Clonezilla also copies the "bad sectors" of the original hard drive?, but I am not sure though :(  

> 
> Or will a straight dd do it?
>
This could do it, but I would prefer Clonezilla :)
>      add new drive as PATA slave
> /dev/sdb
>      dd -if /dev/sda -of /dev/sdb
>      remove /dev/sda
>      change the jumpers on /dev/sdb to
> match what was /dev/sda
>      reboot
> 
> In the dd procedure, I'm not sure what to do if sdb is
> larger than sda.
> 
> -- 
> -- Steve
> -- 

Regards,

Antonio