HDA1 is going to die, SMART says its well beyond dead, and I can tell the read/write times have gone up drastically.

I know I can use dd to copy it from a live CD.

1.) If I dd it to something.img, is there a way for me to "work" on the backup copy? Basically, I need to backup ASAP, but won't have a replacement drive for a while, so I'll need to be able to put the changes into the backup.

2.) When it comes time to restore, if I dd it to a larger drive, is there a way to take advantage of all the extra space? I assume I can dd it over and the MBR & Partition Table will go with, so I can use something like gparted to grow the partition to the drive size?

Or is there a better way to make a backup?

A better way IMO would be using tar or cpio.
Or any GUI frontend for the aforementioned.

If you are worried I would strongly suggest that you look into ddrescue (the debian package is called gddrescue) which builds as good as possible bit copy of the failing disk, and it incrementally builds the bad blocks etc, and it can stop and start and it can be run numerous times.

However if you hdd is seriously dodgy then you would be better of using a live cd (such as knoppix 5.1) which avoids booting from the hard disk and only loads the operating system into ram - thereby avoiding any unnecessary read/writes to the drive. I believe that knoppix does include ddrescue.

I regularly 'backup' my os partitions to a created imageYYMMDD.txt file in a partition on my usb drive and it grows automagically to the 10.6GB that my os's reside in. I can then mount it as a loop device and read it from another distro.

Hope this helps

I strongly suggest that you read: http://www.debianadmin.com/recover-d...-ddrescue.html

This seems to work (I tried it with a smaller XFS partition to see what would happen).

Old drive:
20GB XFS (hda1)
Has MBR/Grub
Contains /

xfsdump -f /mnt/external-1/xfs.bak /dev/hda1

New drive:
60GB XFS (sdf1)

xfsrestore -f /mnt/external-1/xfs.bak /dev/sdf1

Seems to have put all the files back in place as far as I can quickly visually tell.

Question 1: xfsdump seems to work on a mounted fs. Safe? Or shall I use a livecd so its not mounted?

Question 2: How do I go about the grub install again? I think this will work:
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit

Should put it back in the MBR on the replacement drive, and put the menu back together, correct?


Edit: Live dump on / goes bad, it takes all the things mounted as well...