[H-GEN] Coping one h/d to another

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

On 4/5/06, David <djmunn at bigpond.com> wrote:

> i have hda drive set up with a Win XP primary partition
> which has gone belly up.....the Extended partition has Mandriva Linux
> 2006 in 3 partitions hda5 /boot hda6 Swap and hda7 /

> it is these 3 partitions that i want to copy to hdb
> which has hdb1 /boot hdb2 Swap and
> hdb3 / setup on it.

There's no point whatsoever copying your swap partition:  it's not
treated persistently across reboots anyway.  So you might as well just
create the
hdb2 partition, set it to the swap partition type, and run mkswap on it.  Easy.

> have tried to recover the primary partition but would have to writ a new
> partition table on the disk an that would loose all data..

Writing a new partition table to the disk would not necessarily lose
all your data,
but it would have to be exactly as it was, which sounds a bit
unlikely.  So don't do that.

Can you boot the system from a bootable CD-ROM?  If hda's partition
table is still intact, that would detect the partitions available on
hda so they could be mounted elsewhere and copied, or dd'ed to the new
disk.

You mention having trouble with the howto on this topic.  I assume you
mean the document at
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Hard-Disk-Upgrade.html; which step
is giving you the most trouble?

jason