GRUB question

[Craig White]

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


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