not a good day! I tried transferring my linux 8.0 to a new drive using the WD E-Z install disk and something went wrong, I used the E-Z bios utility on the new drive and it added it to the old drive! Now when I boot up the old drive it says "NO OPERATING SYSTEM INSTALLED" Can I do a recovery of information? I think it may have only cleared a boot partition! What do I do? I have lots of valuable website info on the disk and my site has been down for 3 hours already! Please somebody help!

Maybe read this thread?
Got a boot disk or linux distro cd which can be booted and used to reinstall a bootloader? Or is that not quite the problem?

Thats the exact problem! Do I run a recovery?

Instructions here.

I recently transfered the files from an 8 GB drive to a 60 GB drive and it worked great!! This is how. I first tried to tar the entire drive, but that didn't work, so don't even try that. I tar'd each of the directories by them selves. Only had a problem with 2 or 3 of them. I think it was /dev /proc and one more that I don't remember. I then did the scp command to get them over to the new drive and untar'd them. Once that was done, I put the new drive in my server and shut it down. It took me about 30 seconds to change the IDE and power cables and I turned the server back on. After Redhat went through and found the new hardware it came up and everything was there. I was amazed. In addition to just the OS working, I also have other programs on there that had no problems at all. apache, qmail, webmin, ect. I also have more than a dozen domains that are hosted on that machine.

Try that with Windoze.

Hope this helps.

Kenny

What about using Norton cd ghost or something!

I may be wrong, but I think using a program like ghost, the drive that you are putting it on has to have the same partition size as the drive that you are copying from.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Going back to the recovery scenario...

Run the redhat installer, but instead of hitting enter at the first prompt, type "linux rescue"

Follow the steps, and have the system attempt to discover and mount your system as /mnt/sysimage

If it can't to that DON'T PANIC. Drop to the prompt, and mount the partition:
mount /dev/hda? /mnt/sysimage

Once you have that
chroot /mnt/sysimage

If you have a seperate boot partition:
mount /dev/hda? /boot

Now we re-install the bootloader. I'm assuming you are using GRUB:

Variables: X - the partion number where your BOOT partion lives - 1
(if your boot partion is /dev/hda1 X=0)

grub
(inside grub program)
root (hd0,X)
setup (hd0)

(Assuming of course your OS is on the master of the primary controller.)

More detailed instruction can be found on the gentoo installation guide:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml