GRUB question

[Daniel B. Thurman]

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?