[Techtalk] dying hard drive

[Maria McKinley]

Carla Schroder wrote:
> On Thursday 30 November 2006 15:18, Maria McKinley wrote:
>> Hi there,
>>
>> Asking for more advice... I have a disk that is definitely on its way
>> out. When I boot, it has numerous unrecoverable errors (in the /usr
>> partition), but it does boot up and run. What is the best/easiest way
>> for me to transfer stuff to a new drive? In the past, I've had drives
>> fail more drastically, so that I have to re-install, and then I pull off
>> config and user stuff off of backup. This time my old disk is still
>> bootable, so seems like I should be able to just move stuff over to the
>> new disk before it fails completely. Would love advice on best way to
>> precede...
>>
> 
> The usual method is to install a second hard drive, boot up Knoppix, and clone 
> the old disk with ddrescue. This is very fast and easy. This tells how:
> 
> http://www.debianadmin.com/recover-data-from-a-dead-hard-drive-using-ddrescue.html

Thanks Carla. I'm actually thinking I should just re-build the kernel, 
and start again. As my earlier email stated, I attempted to upgrade x on 
this machine, which turned out to be sort of a disaster (can't get the 
resolution right, gnome is mis-behaving, users will have to change all 
of their preferences...). This machine is one of our main machines, and 
serves operating systems for several diskless machines. So, I'm thinking 
I should just try to get a new hard drive back into the state I had this 
hard drive in last week, and then take another machine and play around 
with switching to Ubuntu or something. I seem to recall hearing good 
things about Ubuntu on this list, and Debian has been sort of driving me 
up the wall lately...

cheers,
maria