[plug] Re: Looking for help maintaining a linux domain server

[Leon Brooks]

On Friday 19 December 2008 18:46:39 Patrick quoted:
>> My Windows computer man and I know enough to be
>> dangerous and I currently need urgent support for a
>> box that says it has problems with the hard drive.

Heather, replacing a hard drive in a Linux server is
typically very simple.

Acquire a replacement hard drive of similar or larger
capacity (e.g. IDE or SATA, almost _anything_ will be
larger). Plug the drive in to an unused drive connector
on the motherboard or into a USB caddy, then into a USB
socket.

Start the computer in single-user mode (runlevel 1).

Copy the entire drive (e.g. typical of copying an IDE
drive into a drive in a USB caddy):

    dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda

Wait for copy to complete. Force disk cache to flush
completely:

    sync
    (wait 10 secs)
    sync

Shut down (init 0), power down, place the new drive into
the original drive socket.

When sure all is working, now is a good time to perform
software updates. I will be in Perth between 24Dec &
28Dec if you need a warm body to do this, then back
again in mid Jan.

Instead of placing the new drive into the original socket
you can place the new drive into a new machine. This is
possible, for example, after copying IDE drive's content
onto a SATA drive. There will probably be 2 or 3 steps
of configuration to do if the devices (e.g. ethernet
card(s)) are not identical.

Cheers; Leon