S.M.A.R.T. tells me my primary fedora drive has lots of bad blocks, so I ordered a used identical drive from ebay.

I want to do the very basic process of making a full backup of my existing drive - so as to replace it with a more or less identical replacement. Logically identical - not necewsarily sector to sector identical.

I am not particularly literate in unix and its children - and seem to find a plethora of descriptinos of how to do what I want to do. which is

1. format the drive - what you may call low level format - ie op sys independent.
2. create a partition system compatible with my existing disk.
3. copy everything from my existing disk to the new disk.
4. put existing disk on the shelf as a backup and start to use new disk.

I'm sure most of you have done this many times. I have with numerous operating systems - but I'm lost here.

Can someone point me to the documentation that tells me how to do this?

Thanks in advance

Dick

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I'd connect the new drive, boot the computer from a live CD or live USB flash drive, and use the dd command. Be forewarned - if you mess up and identify the old drive as the new drive (and vice-versa), you'll end up wiping out everything your old drive rather than copying its contents to the new drive. (been there, done that).

1 members found this post helpful.

fantastic - I didnt know dd could be used that way drive to drvie

I've found a site www.clonezilla.com that has free solution. you download an iso file tht consists of an ubuntu system with a setup for doing disk to disk - as long as the second is .ge. first.

plan to download it and see how well it works

I assume that the SMART system eliminates the need to do a low level formatting since as i understand it, the controller is continiously doing effectively the same thing - but seems like a good idea . no?

again thanks much

dick
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