Best way to replace a drive with a clone

[Andrew Haley]

On 07/31/2010 08:16 PM, Andrew Haley wrote:
> On 07/31/2010 06:59 PM, Steven Stern wrote:
>> 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?  I have the Clonezilla Live CD that I use for backup.  Will that do 
>> it?
>>
>> Or will a straight dd do it?
>>      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.
> 
> You can resize the FS later to occupy the whole partition.
> It's worth doing an fsck first.
> 
> Alternatively, a recipe I always use to copy a partition is:
> 
> cd /newfs
> dump 0f - /oldfs | restore rf -

BTW, you should either do this in single user mode or with the fs
unmounted or readonly.

> This duplicates all the files, but onto a clean new filesystem.
> 
> Andrew.