Replacing a failing hard drive

[papadilbert]

I have a SUSE linux system with 2 hard drives. One of the drives needs to be replaced. How do I do it?

[zachtib]

I assume you mean on the software side of things.
Pop open your computer and replace the drive in question. When SuSE boots, it should detect the new drive and ask you to set it up / partition it

Unless of course the bad drive is the drive SuSE was installed to, in which case you'll have to reinstall SuSE

[papadilbert]

The drive I needed to replace was the one where /home was mounted. I thought I'd get lucky and copy off the data before the drive died. I wasn't so lucky. It's dead and buried. The drive has been replaced but the data is gone.

And yes, I was referring to what was necessary system-wise to create a replacement /home partition. I was using jfs for this partition and have now switched to ext3. Was that a good or bad move?

[zachtib]

i dont know much about different filesystems, I always use reiserFS myself
S, did you get the new drive working and mounted under /home?

[anomie]

1. After physically adding the new drive (remember to set jumpers correctly if it is slave), then use

fdisk

to create a new Linux partition.

2. One you are done with that you do not have to reboot. Instead use

partprobe

to make Linux aware of the newly created partition.

3. Create your filesystem on the new drive. Use

mke2fs

or whatever you want.

4. Add an entry to /etc/fstab. Will probably look something like this for you:

/dev/hdb1            /home                ext3       acl,user_xattr        1 2

- NOTE: This assumes partition is on second physical drive, first partition; also assumes ext3 filesystem.

5. Either reboot or (my preference) drop down to single-user mode with

init 1

and then back up to your normal runlevel - I am assuming 5, so

init 5

That should do it.

To answer your question, yes it was a good move to start using ext3.

[papadilbert]

My system is back online. Thanks for all the help!!!!