gsmartcontrol reports that my hard disk is failing.
I can still read and write to the disk, but I want to replace it before
it's too late. I've not had to do anything like this before, so help! I
have a new disk, ready and waiting.
The failing drive is partitioned as:
/dev/sda1 ext4 / 37.25 GiB
/dev/sda3 ext4 /home 424.63 GiB
/dev/sda2 extended 3.87 GiB
/dev/sda5 swap
After the latest problems, I booted into recovery mode and ran fsck,
accepting the default options, to tidy up orphan files.
I then installed ddrescue, and put a copy of /dev/sda on an external
hard drive:
sudo ddrescue /dev/sda /media/rescue/sda_rescue rescue.log
That gives me a 500 GB file. I've also got (stored separately), gz
backups of /home.
From some of the messages I got when installing ddrescue (from memory,
that there's no version information for various packages, assuming they
are not installed), I've lost some of the synaptic information.
What's my best way forward from here? When I've swapped disks, can I use
dd to write my rescued information to the new hard drive?
If so, is it advisable to do this, or is it better to do a clean
install, and copy over /home from a backup?
If I do a clean install, what's the easiest way of getting a list of
software that I've installed through synaptic, and reinstalling it?
I'm running Mint 13 Mate 64-bit.
--
Kevin Safford
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