Moving slackware from one hard drive to another.
 

Hi.

First I must admit, apart having no "easy" partition utility, slackware install was a breeze! Very cool.

Now, I have two drives, and thought I would use my second, empty drive to install slack. However, it seems that the hardrive will fail any second (very werid noises).

Anyway, is there any way I can simply create the same partitions on my 1st hard drive (i.e. /boot /swap and /) and simply copy them over? Or is there some magic disk that can do this?

Thank you so much for your help.
Abbas.

boot with your slack install CD and run:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc

hda=your primary master IDE (source)
hdc=secondary master IDE (target)

once done, set hdc to be hda (swap cables) and boot with it.

Another solution that you may find simpler is to swap HDs first, then install Slack and finally mount the HD that is "going" and copy from there the files you want to preserve into your "good" HD.

My :twocents:

The "dd" solution offered is a bit dangerous - especially with no warnings.
Better hope there is nothing on the target disk that is wanted.
If so, better hope target disk is no smaller.

Personally I would use fdisk to create the partitions on the target volume, and just use "cp -a ..."
Others will have their own prefered methods.

EDIT: to clarify which post was being referred to.

Hi!

Use a bootable CD (e.g. SystemRescueCd from http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page and use `cp --archive SOURCE DEST` to copy the root partion of your old hd to the new one. After that you mayby have to adjust your /etc/fstab, /etc/lilo.conf on the new hd and finaly you have to run `/sbin/lilo -r <mount point of your new hd>`.

Simple - Read the How To
 

You must read this:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hard-Disk-Upgrade/index.html

there you have everithing you need.

There are a lot of situations to consider, and that how-to explain it all.

Bye

The easiest way I have found is this and I have done it numerous times.

make the drive you are copying to mountable as /temp

Then do this:
cp / /temp -a

Then change the lilo.conf to show the drive temp is on as the root drive
rerun lilo and your done.

Check the connections for the HD making noises and make sure your pc power supply is not going bad. I have ended up with ps that go bad because of poor quality or wild surges in power inspite of surge protection. Luckily good PSs are available and a good investment.
SMART disk check old HD(if it is enabled) can tell you if HD is going bad. Good luck.