CentOS - Jun 2005 - A questiong about replacing my failing drive

First, I am not a RedHat or linux newbie.  I simply have not had to do
what I am getting ready to do, and I want to see if I am going to run into
a problems...

My HDA drive is failing (I can hear the occasional click from it and I am
seeing Smart errors, the transfer rate is slow but all my data is there).

I have 3 partitions on it, the /, /boot/ and my game servers (this is also
the drive the bootloader is on).

Will this proceedure work ok to replace it with the minimum of
downtime/reinstalling

A>  Make bootable floppy
B>  Start in single user mode
C>  Create same partition structure on hew drive
D>  Move all files from old partitions to new partitions
E>  Switch drives
F>  Boot off floppy, mount, reinstall grub and boot manager on new drive
G>  Profit!

Any hangups or snags doing it this way?

Thanks,
Doug Eubanks
doug at simflex.com
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> A>  Make bootable floppy
> B>  Start in single user mode
> C>  Create same partition structure on hew drive
> D>  Move all files from old partitions to new partitions
> E>  Switch drives
> F>  Boot off floppy, mount, reinstall grub and boot manager on new drive
> G>  Profit!
well if you want a real quick'n'dirty way to do it then you can simply 
turn off the computer, hook up the drive, boot with kernel command line 
init=/bin/bash, watch the messages for info on what device name the new 
drive got and do "/bin/dd if=/dev/hd{source} of=/dev/hd{target} 
bs=1048576", once it completes do "/bin/sync" and powerdown,
remove the
old disk and hook up the new disk in it's place and reboot and usually 
everything works normally.  [it does screw up drive geometry but since 
linux uses LBA adressing anyway this is irrelevant]

if there are read errors on the source drive you'll probably want to use 
dd_rescue instead of dd.

From:  Doug Eubanks
> My HDA drive is failing (I can hear the occasional click from it
> and I am seeing Smart errors,
The reason why I never build a system without a 3Ware card today.
> A>  Make bootable floppy
Redundant.
> B>  Start in single user mode
Typically a good idea, but you can do this with the original, and the new hard
drive added.
> C>  Create same partition structure on hew drive
Yes, although it doesn't have to be the same.
Just mount it all as you want under /newroot of the original.
Don't forget to watch out for duplicate filesystem labels,
and change your boot/fstab on the new.
> D>  Move all files from old partitions to new partitions
for i in ?/ /boot/ /other/?: do
  cd $i
  find . -mount | cpio -pmdv /newroot$i
done
> E>  Switch drives
> F>  Boot off floppy, mount, reinstall grub and boot manager on new drive
Or just use the distro's CD and rescue mode.
> G>  Profit!
> Any hangups or snags doing it this way?
Only as mentioned above.

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On Sat, Jun 11, 2005 at 01:08:56PM -0400, Doug Eubanks
wrote:
> First, I am not a RedHat or linux newbie. I simply have not had to do what
I am
> getting ready to do, and I want to see if I am going to run into a
problems...
> My HDA drive is failing (I can hear the occasional click from it and I am
> seeing Smart errors, the transfer rate is slow but all my data is there). I
> have 3 partitions on it, the /, /boot/ and my game servers (this is also
the
> drive the bootloader is on). Will this proceedure work ok to replace it
with
> the minimum of downtime/reinstalling A> Make bootable floppy B> Start
in single
> user mode C> Create same partition structure on hew drive D> Move all
files
> from old partitions to new partitions E> Switch drives F> Boot off
floppy,
> mount, reinstall grub and boot manager on new drive G> Profit! Any
hangups or
> snags doing it this way? Thanks, Doug Eubanks doug at simflex.com
I would like to suggest using dump/restore to make the backup.

Something like:

mount /dev/hdb1 /newroot
dump -0f - / | (cd /newroot; restore -xf -)

[]s

- -- 
Rodrigo Barbosa <rodrigob at suespammers.org>
"Quid quid Latine dictum sit, altum viditur"
"Be excellent to each other ..." - Bill & Ted (Wyld Stallyns)

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Try copying before restarting Linux, via network or something.
I once saw a drive failing at my face after a restart :(

Good luck
Oliver


Doug Eubanks wrote:
> First, I am not a RedHat or linux newbie. I simply have not had to do 
> what I am getting ready to do, and I want to see if I am going to run 
> into a problems... My HDA drive is failing (I can hear the occasional 
> click from it and I am seeing Smart errors, the transfer rate is slow 
> but all my data is there). I have 3 partitions on it, the /, /boot/ 
> and my game servers (this is also the drive the bootloader is on). 
> Will this proceedure work ok to replace it with the minimum of 
> downtime/reinstalling A> Make bootable floppy B> Start in single user
> mode C> Create same partition structure on hew drive D> Move all
files
> from old partitions to new partitions E> Switch drives F> Boot off 
> floppy, mount, reinstall grub and boot manager on new drive G> Profit! 
> Any hangups or snags doing it this way? Thanks, Doug Eubanks 
> doug at simflex.com

-- 
Oliver Schulze L.
<oliver at samera.com.py>

Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> On the Fedora user list the question came up whether dump & restore are
> extended attributes aware. This is an issue i.e. when using SELinux. Do
> the tools take care?
Since 2002, this is the #1 reason I've been advocating that Red Hat
adopt XFS as its' 2nd, officially supported filesystem.  xfsdump for
XFS does this, and always has.  You don't have to use "getfacl" to
save POSIX ACLs (although that was always an option, even back
in the early 2.4.x days for XFS).

Everything (short of SGI-integrated hardware API support) came over
from Irix in XFS for Linux, and that included POSIX ACLs, Quotas, etc...
This is in stark contrast from IBM JFS which came from OS/2 instead
of AIX (because of the legal issues with Monterey), and ReiserFS is
a non-traditional UNIX design (I won't go there, even if it is very
innovative in most respects).   Most of these features in kernel 2.6 
ere thanx to the SGI XFS team, and the team also worked with the
Ext3 and Linux & co. as of 2.5.3+ in ensuring POSIX EAs were uniform
across all filesystems c/o the VFS.

I haven't wanted to bother Tweedie and/or Red Hat in getting an
explaination why they aren't looking at supporting XFS, but I think
it would solve a lot of scalability issues.  I always assumed it wasn't
merely a "NIH" attitude, and they had real reasons for not wanting
to support it until Ext3 proved to be a serious limitation for them.

Rodrigo Barbosa wrote:
> That depends very much on what you are calling extended attributes.
> I have no experience with SELinux, so I really can't make an
> educated guess on what you are talking about.
> Care to enlight me ?
I have to be honest, I've never used xfsdump and verified SELinux
attributes were preserved.  But it should bring _all_ POSIX EAs with
it.  I've just typically relied on it for ACLs.


--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org

From: Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17 at duke.edu>
> The canonical reasons I've heard are 1) they don't want to spend
the
> money/time/resources to acquire enough XFS expertise to support it at the 
> Enterprise level
I could think of 2 guys they could easily snatch away from SGI that could
bring such experience -- pretty much the 2 behind much of the VFS in
kernel 2.6 anyway (so great resources regardless).
> and 2) besides, as of RHEL4 (they claim), XFS doesn't provide anything
> ext3 already provides, so why bother.
Feature-wise, probably not.  The VFS in 2.6 brings a lot of former XFS-only
features to _all_ filesystems.  But I still see serious size limitations as
well as scalability to Ext3 versus XFS.
> Yes, I've pointed out on official Red Hat mailing lists that 2 is false
> due (at least) to the issue of backing up ACLs (use star they say -- no 
> thanks,
Well, Red Hat has shipped Jorg's "star" in RHL8 on-ward to address
this.
> say I), but I got no response to that.  And I've got benchmarks 
> showing XFS pretty handily beating ext3 on nice new hardware, but I
> don't have much faith that would get any response either.
To me, I really could care less about benchmarks except when real
performance issues arise.

All throughout 2.4, every other filesystem -- Ext3, JFS (from OS/2**),
ReiserFS, etc... required hack after hack after hack.  XFS, with its
"core" additions to kernel 2.4 provided _everything_ standard from
day 1 -- Quotas, POSIX EA/ACLs, etc...  It was ported directly from
Irix, and was _entirely_ GPL -- which you'd figure that's something
Red Hat likes.

The only bug that it ever ran into, which resulted in XFS 1.1, was
something that bit me on 2 /var filesystems.  Otherwise XFS, like
Ext3 but _unlike_ JFS or ReiserFS, benefits from being the _exact_
_same_ organization for 10+ years.  Which means not only is its
on-line operation well-trusted, but it's off-line fsck/repair as well
(something that plagues ReiserFS heavily due to design focus).

Because I could care less how a filesystem works when it works.
I want to know what happens when its inconsistent, and a journal
reply won't solve the problem.  I trust e2fsck and xfs_repair.


--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org

From: Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>
> Serious in some cases; not in the general case. Given the above, there has
> to be something *widespread* that ext3 just *can't* do.
Agreed.  I think that's what it's going to take.
Regardless, XFS is GPL, so we all benefit.

Just the XFS dump, resize, etc... tools, as well as day 1 this'n that
support.
Just too tasty compared to the "work-in-progress" I always see on
everything else.


--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org