Best way to replace a drive with a clone - users - Fedora Mailing-Lists

Saturday, 31 July 2010

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.

-- 
-- Steve