Hello Preston, Your problem sounds very much like mine. <PC> My main hard drive is starting to get annoying. <PC> Making a loud whining sound. <PC> It still works, but it's painful to listen to. I know I'm Does your old drive contain a Windows installation? Did this painful whining begin mainly after you installed Linux on the second hard drive? Does it whine only whenever you try to read it from inside Linux? <PC> probably just overly sensitive to noises like that, <PC> but I think I'm going to replace it. Maybe the replacement drive will also groan like this? Maybe the problem is not in the drive but in how Linux access it? In my case, when I work in the Windows 98 installation on my old drive, it does not groan and grate as much. But, anytime I try to access it through SuSE, it sounds as if a grinder is on. Today, as I was booting, my computer said that it predicts that my Windows drive was going to stop working anytime and that I should back up my work. I never had this problem before I installed SuSE Linux a few days ago. <PC> <PC> Preston <PC> Best wishes, Ram. --

On 07 Jul 2003 09:07:00 -0700
Preston Crawford  wrote:

> My main hard drive is starting to get annoying. Making a loud whining
> sound. It still works, but it's painful to listen to. I know I'm
> probably just overly sensitive to noises like that, but I think I'm
> going to replace it. Problem is I've had 8.2 installed for a while and
> configured just so. Is there a way to backup the hard drive to a new
> hard drive and avoid having to set everything up again or install
> everything over again? To copy the drive, perhaps?
Yes. 
My recommendation is:
1. Partition the new drive. You do not need to keep them the same, but
it is easier if you have the same partition scheme. (We'll assume that
you have the same partition scheme).
2. Boot into the rescue system (from the CD).
3. For each partition (eg. file system):
	mount the source file system read only
	mount the destination read/write.
	use can use the cp command witrh the -pR options. 
	unmount both partitions.
4. Then shut off your system, and make the new disk the primary and the
old one a secondary.
5. Boot the CD again, then boot the installed system. (Or boot a rescue
diskette). 
6. Once booted, use YaST to rebuild grub.

The above instructions are designed as the simplest. You can insert a
step after 3 to update grub to boot the new disk. You will then need to
make changes to the /etc/fstab file on the new disk if you want to boot
it without making the hardware swap (essentially, when I build a new
version of Linux, I do it to the second disk, then I use a similar
procedure to copy the root file system to the primary disk when I
decided that is the version I want to use).  
-- 
Jerry Feldman 
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9