Successful hard drive replacement on a laptop

qanuta · n00b Joined: 04 Apr 2003 Posts: 43 Location: NJ, USA

Last night & this morning I successfully replaced the aging (3-4 yrs old) hard drive on my notebook with a new drive. The old one had begun to make "clunking" noises intermittently, and while it still functioned perfectly fine, it was a little disconcerting to hear a drive make those noises. Assuming it was on its way to hard drive heaven, I decided to replace it. Below are the steps that I took, posted in the hope that they might help someone else who wants to replace a notebook hard drive.

Step 1. Prepare a way to transfer the data from your old drive to the new one. With a desktop, this is pretty easy -- you would just put the new drive in alsongside the old, and copy away. But with a notebook, it's a little more difficult -- there's only room for one drive at a time. When I purchased my new 40 GB hard drive (might as well upgrade fom the original 10GB drive while I'm at it!), I also purchased an external mount for a notebook hard drive that plugs into the USB port. The new drive was about $150 and the external drive enclosure was about $50 -- I ordered both from drivesolutions.com, who seem to have a wide selection, actually have items in stock, and have a web page that doesn't suck.

To use the external USB drive converter, you need to make sure USB is compiled into the kernel. You'll need USB, usb-storage modules, and you'll also need to have SCSI and SCSI hard drives enabled since USB drives are always mapped in as SCSI for some reason.

Step 2. Connect the drive and partition it. I hooked up the new drive into the converter, and plugged it into the USB port. It wasn't completely happy at first. As it turns out, the laptop couldn't supply enough power to run the external drive fully. The enclosure had a socket in the back for an external 5V power supply, so I gave it power via the socket, and linux immediately recognized it. You can tell by looking in /proc/bus/usb or alternatively use the easier lsusb function.

The external drive shows up as a SCSI drive, and since it is my only one, it appears as /dev/sda. Using "fdisk /dev/sda", I partitioned the new drive. I was sure to leave an extra partition at the beginning of the drive for the notebook's suspend data (partition type a0 for my HP N5190). I really followed the directions as outlined in the Gentoo installation manual -- a boot partition, a swap partition, and a root partition, the latter being the bulk of the disk. Make sure you set the /boot partition as bootable in the partition table.

Step 3. Copy over the data. First, you need to make the filesystems on each of the partitions. I used mke2fs for the boot partition, mkswap for the swap partition, and mkreiserfs for the root partition. A typical command would look like "mke2fs /dev/sda2" or "mkswap /dev/sda3".

Once you have your filesystem, you can mount it and copy over data with tar. Here is what I did for /boot -- you would have to repeat for each partition you want to copy over.

Mount the original /boot partition, which is not usually mounted by default on my system

hulmeman · Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2003 11:45 am Post subject: Hmmm?

Great post, but I think the syntax may be wrong here:
(cd /boot && tar -cfp - .) | (cd /newboot && tar -xfpv -)
I get this error message:
root@baz3 /mnt/hdh1# (cd /boot && tar -cfp - .) | (cd /mnt/hdh1 && tar -xfpv -)
tar: pv: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: -: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: ./p: file is the archive; not dumped
I can't figure out how to get it to work!
Any ideas?
Baz

qanuta · n00b Joined: 04 Apr 2003 Posts: 43 Location: NJ, USA

Hmmm. After a little experimentation, it seems you are correct. For some reason, it looks like the order of the arguments to tar is important. Try changing the flags on both tars so that the "f" flag is last. So, change

hulmeman · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2003 11:25 am Post subject:

Thanks for the reply, this indeed does work:
(cd /boot && tar -cpf - .) | (cd /newboot && tar -xpvf -)
But, apparently, there is a problem, in that tar can only handle ext2 partitions up to 2 GB, (4GB for reiserfs) but this does work:

# cd /newdrive
# ls /
# bin boot dev etc home lib mnt newdrive opt proc root sbin tmp usr var
# tar -c --recursion /bin > bin.tar
# tar -c --recursion /boot > boot.tar
# tar -c --recursion /dev > dev.tar
# tar -c --recursion /etc > etc.tar........................................

Omitting /proc, /mnt and /newdrive, of course.
If /usr, or any other root directory, is over 2GB, this will need to be broken up also:

# mkdir usr
# cd usr
# ls /usr
# X11R6 games......................................
# tar -c --recursion /usr/X11R6 > X11R6.tar
# tar -c --recursion /usr/games > games.tar..........................................
Then:

# cd /newdrive
# for file in `ls /newboot/*.tar`; do tar xpvf $file; done
# cd /newdrive/usr
# for file in `ls /newdrive/usr/*.tar`; do tar xpvf $file; done
# mkdir proc mnt

Et voila! Done.

There is though a simpler way to do it, boot using a gentoo live cd,
# mount /dev/hd** /mnt/gentoo/olddrive
# mount /dev/hd** /mnt/gentoo/newdrive
# cp -ax /mnt/gentoo/olddrive/* /mnt/gentoo/newdrive
The -x switch instructs cp to stay on same drive, the -a switch instucts cp to never follow symbolic links, preserve the specified attributes and copy directories recursively.
Many thanks,
Baz

pilla · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2003 12:10 pm Post subject:

Moved from H&L
_________________
"I'm just very selective about the reality I choose to accept." -- Calvin

Ravilj · Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 9:34 pm Post subject:

This was really helpful in enlarging my root partition. That cp -ax /... /... was exactly what i was looking for! D: