disk going bad

[Ragni Singh]

Hello, I have 2 disks and during install, I made /root as one partition and put all the other filesystems on another disk. The 2nd disk is going bad now. I want to add a 3rd disk to my system. If I install a 3rd disk, and chnage my /etc/fstab to look at the 3rd disk, will my system come up? BAsically remove the 2nd disk from the fstab. Thanks and points will be assigned.

[njia_1]

Hi

if you system is not booting up now how can you change /etc/fstab file ?

so even /boot is on the bad disk, am I right ?
I do not think that will work. In theory, if you can find a working system and you have some kind of low level copy software to do a disk to disk copy like dd and then replace the bad one with the new disk, that may work.

[Asif Sharif]

Hi Chand,

You did first mistake to make /root on one partition and put all other FS on another disk. Its recommended that you have to install OS on one disk and then mirror it with other one. I agree with njia to do low level copy and then replace. Might be it will work.Else you have to reinstall.

Regards,

Asif Sharif

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom Sanjit,

No.

You will need to first use dd to copy all data from disk 2 to disk 3, then you might be able to do this.

There are other methods as well.

SEP

[Ivan Ferreira]

I'm not sure about what you have describing, If you have /root only on one disk (not /), and all others on the other disk, that is /, /home, /usr, /var, etc. And you want to replace the second disk (with /), you need to move all data to the third disk before doing this.

You should create a new similar filesystem (and partition) scheme, mount as a temporary filesystem, copy all data with "star" and install the boot loader. You should label the file systems if the fstab file uses labels.

After that, you can remove the second disk and install this in it's place.

[Ragni Singh]

thanks all for the help. POints are assigned.

[Alan_152]

seems like a strange way to partition a system, but who am I to judge?

Anyway, all the stuff you need to boot into either network mode or single user mode is on disk 2. You need to dd that stuff to a new disk right away, if possible. I'd grab a knoppix or ubuntu live CD, mount your disks, and try to do the data move from there using dd, cp, tar, or some other utility.

If that isn't an option, you may want to grab a bootable copy of SpinRite 6 from grc.com and try to fix drive 2 well enough to boot up from reliably -- fortunately, SpinRite 6 is now *nix FS compatible.