> - 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 > > Or is there another preferable solution?
This is almost the _worst_ solution, as dd deals with all the blocks on the disk, including blocks not used by the file system (i.e. free space) that you don't need to copy; and it will also copy a filesystem in a possibly inconsistent state (especially if, during the copy, some process is doing a lot of I/O on the file system) It's far better to do a copy from old to new using a live dvd (in order to work on a cleanly unmounted and not write accessed disk); if you are in a real hurry, you could start doing a copy (at file system level, i.e. cp) from old disk to new disk, and then later synchronize it (e.g. re-copying all files changed from the first cp command). If you have an LVM backed file system, and some spare space, you could do a snapshot of the file system with all services stopped, and then copy the snapshot: it could hang your system if you are using an RHEL older than 5.X (guess X it's about 4, not sure) when you snapshot the / partition, but otherwise it will give you the best of both world (consistent file system view and reduced downtime) _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list rhelv5-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
