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Hard disk failing !

Hello folks,
My FC11 is now giving out an alert "One or more disks are failing"

What should I do now ? My hard disk has two operating system on it - FC11 and windows.

One of the possible things would be to create an image of the whole hard disk so that when the disk fail I copy the image to a new hard disk of same (or bigger size) and be online.

How do I go about it ?

Prabhat Soni

You could also create a live image with the available tools.

Anyway, save all config files, repo data, and other important data. The rest can be replaced with some patience and a few commands.

What I would do is just plug in both drives and run:

Code:

dd if=/dev/FAILING_DISK of=/dev/NEW_DISK bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

The above command will copy everything from the failing hard drive to the new one.

But if you want to create an image of the failing disk:

Code:

dd if=/dev/FAILING_DISK bs=4096 conv=noerror | gzip -c > disk_image.gz

And to write the image to the new hard drive:

Code:

gunzip -c disk_image.gz | dd of=/dev/NEW_DISK bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

The above commands should be run from a live cd as root.

If the new disk is larger than the failing disk, you'll probably want to extend the partitions with gparted after cloning the drive

EDIT:
Forgot to mention, the new drive must be at least the size of the failing drive

Thanks Piratesmack,
Let me get it clear. Once I copy this disk image to a bigger disk, grub flash screen will show up as usual, and I will be able to boot into windows or linux just like good old times. All other applications that I have installed in linux as well as windows will be there (at least theoretically). Am I right in expecting so ?

Thanks once again for your prompt response......

Prabhat Soni