LinuxQuestions.org - Hard Drive Upgrade Oddities (fstab/fdisk)

I am trying to install a new hard drive in a Fedora Core 1 system, but have ran into some odd stuff here. First some background. I installed FC1 on a system with two IDE drives awhile back (before FC2 came out) and did a basic install. Everything went fine and I have been using the system since then. I only ever used the single hard drive though which is /dev/hdb1.

Now I want to remove the two hard drives and duplicate the data from the drive with the data and clone it onto a larger drive. I thought it would be straight forward because I never used the 2nd hard drive, it was just there from a previous application.

When I do a df –hT though it shows:

Code:

Filesystem        Type        Mounted On

--------------------------------------

/dev/hdb1        ext3        /

/dev/hda1        ext3        /boot

none                tmpfs        /dev/shm

So this leads me to believe that during the install the boot partition was loaded onto the second hard drive. So what I need to do (I think) is create a new partition on the /dev/hdb1 for boot and then delete the one on /dev/hda1. Then I’m not sure where /dev/shm is since the Filesystem says “none”, but it must be somewhere right? Or is it none because that is the RAM?

So then I did a fdisk /dev/hda1 to see what it said. This is where it took another turn. The message fdisk says is:

Code:

Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI, or OSF disklabel

Building a new DOS disklabel.  Changes will remain in memory only,

 until you decide to write them.

After that, of course, the previous content won’t be recoverable.



Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be correct by w(rite)

Not understanding this since the system has been running fine for quite some time I enter “p” to view the partition table. When I do this it is blank for both drivers. Another strange thing though is when “p” is entered it shows the header information, but shows only a 195meg drive instead of a 40gig hard drive. For the /hdb1 it says 40.0 GB, but for the /hda1 it says 106 MB.

When I was trying the fdisk message on Google one site said that the jumpers may be on cable select instead of master/slave. I will check this tomorrow, but I don’t think that is it.

Then I thought there may be errors on the drive so I ran a “smartctl –a /dev/hda1” and that came back passed with no errors. However the hdb1 drive said passed, but it also had 3 errors. So I’m not sure if that has anything to do with anything.

I have been playing around with another FC1 and a FC3 machine and I also tried using the fdisk command there and received the same error. So it seems like this is something common and I may not need to worry about it.

Any suggestions/pointers/words of widom?

Then to summarize what I would like to do is make sure all data is being stored on a single hard drive (the /dev/hdb1) so I can take the other drive out. I would then clone that drive to a larger drive and get rid of both small drives. So I need to move the /boot partition from the one drive to the other, plus deal with any of the other problems like I mentioned above. Then lastly I believe before /boot can be moved I need to shrink the size of the / partition so there is enough room for the /boot.

Thanks in advance