2012-12-28



Worked on my dad's computer. The plan was simple: Replace the old
and  loud 4G system disk with a much newer 120G disk and set up a
RAID1 for this new disk and the other large disk that hosted  the
home directories.

I used gparted on a LiveCD (slitaz this time) because that's con-
venient.   Unfortunately, when resizing the home disk, read/write
errors appeared and the disk wasn't accessible anymore. That's no
fun  when  working with filesystems and partitions. I should have
made a backup first. ;-) Luckily, I lost no data.  The  disk  was
accessible again after restarting the machine. First I copied all
data from the unstable disk to the new disk (using `cp -dRp', not
`rsync').   During this task, the unstable disk failed a few more
times but it was always working again after a reboot. Eventually,
I had all the data cloned.

Then I moved the system partition from  the  old,  loud  disk  to
another partition on the new disk. Hence, I had all data from the
two separate disks (the old one and the unstable one) on two par-
titions of the new disk. It took quite some time to get there.

I removed the  old  disk,  deactivated  the  unstable  disk,  and
prepared  the  new disk to be bootable. First I fiddled with grub
(-legacy):

     grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/hdd

I solved a related problem.  [0]

I like the simplicity of the  /dev/[hs]dx  names  much  and  have
problems  getting  used  to  partition  hashes which all look the
same.  As I know where I've connected each disk,  I  prefered  to
use the speaking names, not the UUIDs.

As I have never liked grub, I decided to  install  lilo  and  use
that  with  a  very  simple  configuration,  which  is only a few
changes to the man page example in lilo.conf(5).


This is where I settled for today. In the next days, the unstable
disk  should  become the twin disk in the RAID1 setup. (I believe
that an unstable disk is better than no hardware backup at all.)

[0]  http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-
2/solved-grub-install-dev-hdx-does-not-have-any-corresponding-
bios-drive-error-401582/


http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>