Hi Mirko,
> The drive /dev/sda on which the kernel, root, and RHEL in general live is
> slowly dying (based on smartctl). I have the replacement drive in hand.
>
> Is the following possible?
>
> - put the replacement drive into an empty bay
> - clone /dev/sda onto it like: *dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc
> *- move the new drive into the /dev/sda drive bay
That might work if you're lucky. And by lucky I mean that
a) your dying hard drive is still functional enough that dd can read
all files on it and copy them over to the new drive, and
b) your system is absolutely idle when you do this dd copying,
such that the file system doesn't change during the copying,
since otherwise your copy might not be mountable.
But I don't think you can 'dd' an entire drive like that;
I think you need to first partition the new drive identically
to your old drive, and then coppy each partition with
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdc1
and so on.
I've done that in the past, and usually had to try several times
until I had a file system copy which was mountable.
I always make sure that there's NOTHING running on the machine,
and so a 'sync' several times before starting the copy, just for good
measure.
Assuming that works, you'll still need to boot the system with a live
or rescue CD or something equivalent after you switched to the new drive
and "find" the new O/S and mount it with 'chroot', and then add the
boot loader to the new master boot record with something like
/sbin/grub-install /dev/sda
and that should make your new drive bootable.
> Or is there another preferable solution?
Not that I know of.
Good luck,
Horst
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