My hard drive is dying... what to do?
 

Hi,

I installed Fedora Core 4 on my Compaq PC a couple of years ago. It's used as a file and mail server and it's working really well.

Sadly, one of the two hard drive is about to die (making loud noises). The other (bigger) drive is fine and has loads of free space. I believe the drives are set up as one logical drive.

Since the bad drive is still working, it is possible to "re-partition" the drives and move everything to the good drive and then disable to bad drive and ditch it?

What else can I do?

Thanks a lot!

First find out how the drives are setup. If you are using LVM, the read through the LVM Howto on the www.tldp.org site. There is a utility program on moving the data off a disk.

Thanks for the reply!

How do I find out if I use LVM or not? I simply installed FC4 using the default setting.

Post contents of /etc/fstab file. If things like vol**** exist then LVM is setup.

Brian

I tried to do a pvmove /dev/hdb but it says cannot find /dev/hdb. I guess because it's part of the logical volume. What should I do?

My /etc/fstab looks like:


/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
/dev/shm /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sys /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 0 0

You need to create a LVM partition on the drive then you can easily move from on or the other. You can even span a partition across multiple drives. I don't use LVM so not much help as to the exact commands one uses. There is a gui tool in the system menu that should help.

Brian