[gurutech]

I'm running Fedora 17, with 3 physical drives, one 80gb, and two 120gb (non-raid). I want to replace one of the 120gb drives with a 500gb drive that I have laying around, and just want to make sure I'm not doing something stupid that will cause me to lose all the data on the 120gb drive that I will be replacing.

My plan is to do a disk copy with HD Clone (which I have used before), and then just swap in the 500gb while removing the 120gb drive. I'm expecting nothing major to happen, other than a possible automatic "fsck" run on the new drive.

Is there anything else I should be looking out for before I do this? Do I need to change any system settings to let the system know I have a new drive in the system?

Thanks in advance!

[saikee]

If the drive is not used for booting you can just do normal file transfer after formatting the partitions to your preferred sizes.

Cloning is only needed if you need the target bootable immediately after replication. By definition cloning is done with a sector-by-sector copying and the filing system is not used and the boot sector (not part of a filing system) is also transferred.

To avoid loss of data you should know exactly which one is the source disk (the one to be read) and which one is the target (the one to be written on). So do a

fdisk -l

as root before and after the connection of the new hard disk. When the cloning is completed remove the source disk and put in its place the target disk and everything should work exactly as before.

Everything you want can be done by a Linux terminal.

[DoubleHelix]

80GB and 120GB are capacities associated with IDE, and 500GB drives are SATA. You have a motherboard that supports both types? And supports booting from either? And capacities that large?

[gurutech]

Yes, everything is IDE. I'm not 100% sure about the system supporting a 500gb drive, but I do know that it won't support SATA without an adapter card.

Basically what I have is a separate Win7 system with an IDE 500gb drive and a 2.0tb SATA drive, and a separate 500gb SATA drive. I also have an 80gb SATA drive in another Win7 machine. I want to clone the 80gb SATA to the 500gb SATA, as I need more space on this machine, then use the "old" 80gb SATA and clone the 500gb IDE to that (it only has about 50gb of data, with no intention of increasing), then take the 500gb IDE and use that to replace one of the 120gb IDE's in my Linux machine.

It will be a long process, but worth it in the end. The reason I want to do this is that I need more space on my current machine, may even do a dual boot eventually, and the Win7 machine that currently has the 500gb IDE and 2.0tb SATA has a BIOS problem where it will try to boot off the SATA if my power goes out, and I have to reset the boot order in BIOS to get it to boot. I'm hoping by making both drives SATA, I can bypass this...

[saikee]

gurutech,

Everything you want to do with the hard disks sound standard to me.

The BIOS do not change the booting order of the queue and devices if you do not change the hardware. The BIOS could be "forced" to change the factory setting only if you withdraw or add extra internal hard disk. The motherboard is factory set to boot the hard disk controllers in a prefixed sequence and so the ports will be scanned in an orderly fashion. If you follow the motherboard manual there is less work for yourself.

As far as I know most motherboards scan the IDE channesl first before the Sata ports.

[gurutech]

Just swapped out the 80gb SATA for the 500gb SATA using a Linux Live CD (seems my HDClone CD was corrupt...)

Did a "dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda" command and it worked fine (I put the 500gb drive in place of the 80gb before I started, so the 500gb was sda, and the 80 was sdb). Only complaint was that I should have shut down completely before cloning. I hibernated, and the hibernation didn't resume properly, but other than that, I'm all good. The 80gb drive had a ton of bad clusters on it. Maybe after verifying everything works software wise on the new drive, I can low-level it.

[saikee]

When you transfer the old 80Gb with bad clusters to the new 500Gb the bad clusters will appear as empty spaces in the new 500Gb. It is not a perfect clone but you should be able to salvage whatever possible.

I would be very careful with the 80Gb as bad clusters are the early indicator of a failing hard disk.

[gurutech]

I know all about bad hard drives. Had three laptop SATA drives go bad on me, from different laptops... Replaced one so far (it was on a MAC), but just using the others as spares right now, not holding an OS, just backups of backup data.