Jonathan Matthews wrote: > Hi all > > My server's harddisk is making weird noises and telling me at the > console that various things went wrong. > All in all, I reckon the drive is about to die. > > How would people go about transferring the whole system (dpkg details > and all) over to another disk (which I'm just about to buy) and then > removing the faulty one? > I've got no problem with putting the two disks in concurrently, but I'm > not sure how to go about moving it all, short of bzipping each partition > up. Even then, would that actually guarantee a working system? > My hard disk started making those noises and just hosed my system one day so i had to reinstall the system. So now i have the solution which is a program called 'Mondo'.
Mondo does a complete backup and restore of your system to bootable CD's. It has 1-9 compression and burns cds on the fly. Then you just reboot the CD and it restores the whole system. It even will repartition your hard drive if you want. So i use it to clone my Debian and Slackware systems to extra partitions (i used it to restore my ext2fs to reisrefs on one partition and ext3 on another ). It makes a great 'Bare Metal Rescue' disk, because you just add the new hd and boot the Mondo cd, and it restores the system. You can find Mondo at: http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/