upgrading drive problems

[Eric Whitcombe]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Reuben D. Budiardja" <techlist at voyager.phys.utk.edu>
To: <linux at rhobson.com>; "General Red Hat Linux discussion list"
<redhat-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Friday, April 23, 2004 2:03 PM
Subject: Re: upgrading drive problems


> On Friday 23 April 2004 03:19 pm, Richard F. Hobson wrote:
> > I am upgrading the HDD on my RH9 box.  I used Drive Image 2002 to clone
> > the drive (disk-to-disk copy in their terminology).  The copy appeared
> > to go well, the two partitions and unpartitioned swap space were
> > recognized correctly on my old drive  and each partition appeared to
> > copy correctly.  (source was master and new drive-destination was
> > slave).  I removed the original drive and setup the new one a master and
> > upon booting got the message "operating system not present".
>
> It may copy the partitions correctly but not the MBR, thus you have no
> bootloader to load the operating system.
>
I was going mention this. Although it is very suspicious that the
"Drive-To-Drive Copy" option didn't also copy the MBR. That's what those
utilities are supposed to do so the novice customer can effortlessly use the
drive the company is selling in any a way on their system - not only as a
data drive but to replace the boot drive.

But then again I have had problems with some of Western Digital's versions
of such utilities. I had to use another utility (on the same install disc)
that updates MBR's (and has the option to store  the old one in case the
update doesn't work) That was necessary for replacing a Windows NT boot
drive when I bought a new drive to make a dual boot system with RH9. Windows
writes a GUID to the MBR to try and preserve the drive letter when drives
are added/removed from the system. Unfortunately it forced the old boot
drive to always be "C:" which screwed things up for the page file. The
utility whic updated the MBR did the trick. Perhaps your drive has this
abitlity)

Eric W
_End_
> What version of Redhat are you using and what boot loader you had before
(grub
> or LILO ) ?
>
> The "generic" way, I guess, is to:
>
> 1. Connect your new drive
> 2. Boot using the Redhat CD 1, at prompt type "Linux rescue" to enter to
> rescue mode
> 3. Install the bootloader to the MBR of the new drive. This depends on
whether
> you're using Grub or LILO as boot loader. Look at Redhat documentation or
> search the web on how to do this, or maybe if you can give us this
> information we can help more.
>
> Also, while you're in the rescue mode, probably check the /etc/fstab of
the
> new drive (you need to mount the new drive / partition). Depending on how
> good is the Drive Image 2002, it may or may not copy the partition label.
> /etc/fstab use partition label by default rather than partition name (eg
> /dev/hda1, dev/hda2, etc). If Drive Image 2002 does not copy the partition
> label correctlu, linux may get confused during booting, so the safest way
is
> to change /etc/fstab to use partition name.
>
> HTH
> RDB
> -- 
> Reuben D. Budiardja
> Department of Physics and Astronomy
> The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> "To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy
> something, don't you? Really, I'm not out to destroy
> Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional
> side effect."
>                  - Linus Torvalds -
>
>
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