Boot disk replacement

[gastone]

My amahi boot disk is making strange noises lately and i was thinking before it fails maybe i could make an image of it to a new drive of the same capacity and replace the old.
Do you know if that will work or not?

[bigfoot65]

It should. Recommend you use a tool like Clonezilla or Redo Backup for the image. You may have to make some minor configurations changes, but should still have a working system.

I have my OS drive backed up using Clonezilla. I have restored it numerous times to different drives with no issues.

[gastone]

Thank you very much for your answer!
Is there a guide on how its done? Because the minor changes you refer to scare me a little... i don't know much about linux....
It seems that i'll be needing to replace the disk sometime really soon...
Thanks again

[gastone]

I did it tonight...
I cloned my hard drive to a new one, replaced the old and so far everything seems to be working fine.
The only problem is that the original hard drive was 500gb and the new is 1tb but only half is used.The other half is unallocated.
How do I resize the drive so the whole 1tb is used? I don't want the system to recognize it as a different partition I want it to be united with the first part.
Thanx

[moredruid]

you can resize partitions with PartImage (separate product) or GParted (installable through yum).
If the disk is setup as LVM you can use that of course.

[gastone]

the disk is set up as lvm and gparted says "Logical Volume Management is not yet supported"
I searched for partimage but it shows as disk backup utility and i only found stuff related to fedora 13 and 14, I have 12.
Any ideas?
Thanx

P.S. when i right click LVM and choose information in gparted it says "not mounted"
should i have done anything else when i cloned the disk besides replacing the old with the new????
why does it say "not mounted"
Resize of coarse is deactivated....

On my boot drive gparted shows:
Partition - File System - Mount Point - Flags
dev/sda1 - ext4 - /boot - boot
dev/sda2 - lvm2 - - lvm
unallocated - unallocated

[moredruid]

hmm
you should probably look into a linux rescue, focusing on LVM recovery.
boot into a linux rescue mode, run pvscan vgscan and lvscan to see if your LVM metadata can be recovered. After that I'm not completely sure what to do but "recover LVM" in Google should help you quite a bit.

[bigfoot65]

If you used clonezilla to backup and restore your OS drive, there is an option that will spread the image over larger drives. It is under advanced options I believe and works well.

I have cloned drives and restored to larger ones with no issues. It made use of the extra space quite nicely.

[gastone]

If you used clonezilla to backup and restore your OS drive, there is an option that will spread the image over larger drives. It is under advanced options I believe and works well.

Unfortunately i can't do that because i had both disks connected and cloned them straight away without first creating an image.
I tried to create an image from the current installation but returned some errors and didn't even start.

Gparted creates a primary partition on the unpartitioned space but returns an error and doesn't format it to ext4. I thought if I formated it I could try using Logical Volume Manager to extend the one i already have.

[gastone]

PROBLEM SOLVED!!!!

It was all gparted's fault....
I used Disk Utility ( or Palimpsest Disk Utility ) to create the partition and without formatting it I opened "Logical Volume Management" and found the partition under "uninitialised entities" then i chose "initialize entity" and then above at "logical view" - "lv-root" i chose "edit properties" and at "size" it had the extra space available to extend and so I did. It took some time to complete but it worked like a charm!!!!