backup up a laptop disk for replacement

[Ben Boulanger]

On Thu, 7 Nov 2002, Rodent of Unusual Size wrote:
> heh.  my laptop drive is starting to whine and buzz, so
> ibm is sending me a replacement.  that's cool hardwarily,
> but.. what's the best path for backing the current drive
> up and restoring it onto the new one?  rh 7.2, five partitions
> on the drive.  i have my 7.2 cds.  i'm guessing one possibility
> is to come up on the cd, do a dump 0 of each filesystem off
> to another system over the network, replace the unit, fdisk
> it and newfs it to get the partition structure back, and
> then restore 0 the dumps back over the network.  the two parts
> of that i'm unsure about are a) doing stuff over the network
> from the cd boot, and b) writing the boot block on the new
> drive.

Rsync is your friend here.  If you have the ability to run 2 drives at 
once on your laptop, just rsync it across.  If not, rsync it out to 
another box and then rsync it back (boot with some rescue CD or 
something.. I use linux super rescue for such things)

Ben


-- 

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we
fall. 
  ~ Confucius