[SlugLUG] When Bad Hard Drives Happen to Good Linuxes

[Peter Belew]

Hi - note:

On 10/3/06, Eric Carter <Ecnassianer at greenstorm.net> wrote:
> On 10/2/06, cerise at armory.com <cerise at armory.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 12:14:06PM -0700, Eric Carter wrote:
> >
> >    Put both drives in, dd if=/dev/$olddisk of=/dev/$newdisk conv=noerror,
> > reboot, pull the old drive out[1], boot up again, run e2fsck on
> > $newdisk.  That
> > ought to effectively duplicate the drive (including the bootsector and
> > partitioning).
> >    I'd follow that up by consistency checking / on /dev/hdb, converting it
> > to
> > ext2 with tune2fs[2], and using parted to resize (and possibly extend) the
> > now-ext2 filesystem.  Add any other partitions you desire, then use
> > tune2fs
> > to change the / filesystem to an ext3 fs.
> >
> > -Phil/CERisE
>
>
> This is the solution I'm looking for I think. I'll give it a try when the
> new drive comes.
>
> [2] As far as I know, you cannot directly resize ext3 because of its
> >     journalling.  As a result, you need to replay the journal and convert
> > it
> >     to a resizable ext2 fs first.  I could be wrong though.  The way to
> > find
> >     out would be to see if parted will resize it for you.
>
>
> I hope ext3 can be resized. Doing stuff like converting partitions from one
> type to another and back is the kind thing that generally unnerves me. (Be
> it word processor documents or partitions, I'm always afraid the
> conversion/process isn't really as lossless as it claims).

The difference between ext2 and ext3 is the addition of journalling
in ext3 - basically the conversion is just taking away the journalling.
Apparently the resizing in parted doesn't know how to deal with
the journalling (and I expect it would be difficult). Converting back
to ext3 just rebuilds the journal structures. So it's not that scary.

I'll let the experts chip in with their wisdom ... :)

Peter

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