Ghost ideas/thoughts please

[Andrey Andreev]

Colin J Thomson wrote:
> I finally installed my new SATA drive and with a bit work I can see the 
> drive with "dmesg". It was just a case of probing the correct driver and 
> adding it to my rc.local, the Drive is seen as a SCSI (sda)
> I guess thats what I get for running a custom kernel (a bit more work to 
> do) :)
[snip/paste]
> NOTE that the SATA shows as "hde" when I booted in rescue mode with the FC2 
> CD's.. 

Hey, it's a good thing to blame yourself before claiming that the kernel 
got it all wrong. Congrats! However, there has actually been a change in 
  the kernel, around 2.6.7 if I'm not mistaken, which caused, among 
other things, SATA drivers on certain controllers to become visible as 
SCSI drives, whereas they were visible as IDEs before. That confused 
some people out there for a second or two, me included. Nothing wrong 
your custom-built kernel. :)

> I guess then some work/changes maybe required in Grub once I set my BIOS to 
> boot from the SATA drive?

Sure, make sure you look up the GRUB name of your drive. Let's say you 
have both IDEs and your "new" SCSI disk. For example, with two 2-channel 
IDE controllers, and your linux boot partition on the second partition 
of your first SCSI (SATA in this case) drive, I'd guess you'd want to 
boot off (hd4,1) or something like it. Look it up, I'm not claiming 
total correctness.

BTW, AFAIR, GRUB did not want to boot off my Seagate on a Sil3112A. 
Don't know why, as I didn't really want to fix it.

You'll also want to change your /etc/fstab

> I have followed the threads on "ghosting" a drive but I dont feel very 
> comfortable just yet trying it, the plan of action is ghost my working fC2 
> system (hda) to the new SATA drive (sda) and Boot from the SATA drive.
> 
> The plan of action is to boot up from the FC2 CD in rescue mode and use DD, 
> and issue this command:
> 
> dd if=/dev/hda of/dev/hde

That would copy everything, including the MBR, labels, the partition 
tables and stuff from hda to hde. If that's what you want, OK. If you'd 
rather copy only a partition, you'd partition your hde in advance with 
fdisk, parted, etc., and then dd just the partition you want to copy 
into the partition you want it to land to. Like:

dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/hde1

Now, if someone has some knowledge on how buffersize affects the copy, 
please help here. I've always used a Big Buffer (see the bs option of 
dd), and never checked if it makes a difference.

BTW. I don't know if using dd for the job is in keeping with good style, 
but it has worked for me repeatedly. I have a feeling one could manage 
faster and cleaner with cp, but I'm too lazy to try.

> 
> BTW I can't see and "switch" in DD that will show me progress of the 
> copying,

???

> How does this look or would it be easier/safer to try another method, I 
> have heard of "Spinrite"? being mentioned but have yet to look that one up, 
> anyone had any expereince with Spinrite..

Spinrite is a commercial product, that can sometimes fix physically bad 
sectors on a bad drive. It is an extremely cool product, in my oppinion, 
but it's not what you need.


Good luck,

//Andro

-- 
Andrey Andreev
University of Helsinki
Dept. of Computer Science