GRUB question

[Daniel B. Thurman]

Craig White wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 08:46 -0700, Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
>   
>> Craig White wrote:
>>     
>>> On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 08:23 -0700, Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
>>>   
>>>       
>>>> Smartd has reported that I have 7 uncorrectable
>>>> errors and it appears to be located in my swap
>>>> partition.  Zeroing out the swap partition and
>>>> mkswap, failed to correct it.  So it seems that
>>>> the drive after less than 1 year has gone bad.
>>>> Looks like I will have to RMA the drive as
>>>> it is still under a 5yr. warrantee.
>>>>
>>>> So, I bought a new drive and used gparted to
>>>> copy over all the partitions sans the swap
>>>> partition from the bad drive over to the new
>>>> drive.  Everything is now copied over but I am
>>>> still in doubt of the new drive's MBR sector.
>>>>
>>>> Question: using gparted, does it also include
>>>> the boot sector MBR when copying over the
>>>> first partition or do I have manually copy the
>>>> boot sector over or to apply the grub-install?
>>>>
>>>> If so, what is the best way to ensure that the
>>>> MBR is on the new drive?
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> ----
>>> I didn't realize gparted could copy partitions from one drive to another
>>> but the MBR is not in any partition but rather the first 446 bytes of
>>> the 512 bytes reserved in the boot blocks
>>>
>>> The best way is to have installer DVD/USB and boot into rescue mode,
>>> chroot to /mnt/sysimage and then simply run 'grub-install /dev/sda'
>>>
>>> Craig
>>>   
>>>       
>> Yes, gparted can do that; copy partitions from drive to drive.  Very. very
>> handy program, especially when it exists on a LiveCD so that you can
>> work with unmounted filesystems.  I use the Ubunto LiveCD to do this
>> as it does not exist on Fedora's LiveCD, but no big deal I think. The nice
>> thing is that it allows you to resize/move partitions around while you are
>> reorganizing a new drive.
>>
>> Question: Could I simply use dd to copy over the MBR from drive to drive
>> or is it too risky?
>>     
> ----
> personally, I think it is too risky but it's your setup...
>
> dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdY bs=446 count=1
>
> You asked what is the best way, I answered but apparently you don't like
> best way answers.
>
> Craig
No... it's not that I don't like "your" 'best way answers',
as it appears either way works (grub-install &| dd).  What
I like about the dd-way is the ability to do backups but
what the heck, maybe that is not even needed. ;)