Big Grub Issue

[SteveRiley]

Hm, not so old then. I'm flummoxed -- how does a computer forget to boot after sitting idle for a few days?

[Fintan]

A few hours will do it

[Fintan]

The long smart test will be finished in about 40 min.

I may just get a new HD.

I would like to do this as harmlessly (timewise) as possible.
I have never done this on linux. On windows I used nortan to make a copy of my partitions and then copy them over to the new disk. This was over ten years ago!

Can I do this with pmagic live cd and clonezilla?

[SteveRiley]

The following will work only if the physical capacity of the new drive is equal to or greater than that of the old drive.

1. Remove the data connector from the old drive.

2. Attach the new drive to this connector.

3. Attach the old drive to some other connector.

4. Boot PartitionMagic or GParted Live.

5. Verify that /dev/sda is the new blank drive and /dev/sdb is the old drive:

mkdir -p /mnt/a

mount /dev/sda /mnt/a

ls -al /mnt/a  [COLOR="#B22222"]<-- should be blank[/COLOR]

umount /mnt/a

mkdir -p /mnt/b

mount /dev/sdb /mnt/b

ls -al /mnt/b  [COLOR="#B22222"]<-- should have your stuff[/COLOR]

umount /mnt/b

6. Copy the old drive to the new:

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=16M

Do not mix up the order of sdb and sda in the command above, or else you'll have copied a blank drive onto your existing drive!

Follow the next two steps if your new drive has a physical capacity greater than your old drive.

7. Reboot, still using your PartitionMagic or GParted Live (easiest way to get the new partition tables in memory)

8. Open the GUI partition manager and resize your partitions as you see fit. There will be some blank space on the drive that you can use.

[Fintan]

Ok. I was thinking of cloning to an external drive first then removing the old drive and inserting the new drive, then cloning back from ext. drive to new drive. I have a few partitions on the old drive and would like to keep them as is. will the dd command take care of that for me?

[SteveRiley]

My procedure copies the entire drive, including the partition table and every partition. The new drive will be a bit-for-bit duplicate of the old one, plus some unused space if it's bigger.

I prefer to write to the new drive using the same controller that I'll be reading from once dd is finished. Thus my suggestion of plugging the new drive into the space occupied by the old one, and connecting the old one someplace else. In your situation, the old drive should go in the external enclosure. Then you need to run dd only once -- from the drive in the enclosure (the old one) to the internal drive (the new one).

[SteveRiley]

Well, hang on -- I'm assuming here that your enclosure can hold your internal drive. If it can't, then yeah, you'll need to run dd twice, in the pattern you mentioned.

[Fintan]

So, just to get this straight I dd from old drive to ext. drive. Replace old with new and then dd from ext. to new.

[SteveRiley]

If you can't place your old drive in the external enclosure, then yes, your statement is correct.

[Fintan]

OK. Great I will give that a whirl. Cheers

[vinnywright]

sory for jumping in late ,,,,,and if you have done the disk copy already I suppose it dose not mater ,,, but wile reading this thread I did not notes if you had the problem wile restarting the box (from a shutdown) or waking it up from a suspend ?

and suspend to RAM and suspend to disk are 2 different things ,,,,,,,,,,,in your post #31 you say "yes suspend to RAM / disk" like it's the same thing , it is not.

so is this happening from a shutdown or from a suspend .


VINNY

[Snowhog]

Fintan@

You said this is a laptop. By chance, when you shutdown an reboot in the morning, is the clock time off as well? How old is the laptop? The next time your boot (the next morning) enter the BIOS and see what time it reports. I'm thinking along the lines of a CMOS battery (in the case of a laptop, a CMOS capacitor) that is not holding a charge for as long as it should.

[Fintan]

Thanks guys, this happens after the laptop has been shut down for a while, at least a few hours.

The time on the desktop is correct so I presume the bios time is as well. I'0ll check in the morning.

[SteveRiley]

I'm thinking along the lines of a CMOS battery (in the case of a laptop, a CMOS capacitor) that is not holding a charge for as long as it should.

Heh, I had wondered the same thing and asked about the battery's age in post #32. Fintan replied in post #34, indicating that it's only about two years old.

Great minds, &c.