I apologize if this has been on this list recently; I just looked through several months of archives and didn't see it, but I'm quite sure I saw it on one of my lists fairly recently. My problem is that my hard drive is failing and eventually it just isn't going to start up, so I am hurrying to replace it. The old hard drive is 2.5gig and the new hard drive will be much larger: 20gig. I don't have a backup medium, though I have been able to tar my home directory and place the tar package in my zipslack on my dos hard drive. However, we will also be removing the dos hard drive as it is old and apparently not compatible to be on the same ide with the newer hard drives, at least with my bios. The plan is to have a dos partition on the sme hard drive as linux, though if I could afford it I'd still rather have two separate hard drives. I have been leaving my machine on because of the risk that I may never be able to bring up my hard drive again if I turn it off' I've had to try and try to get it to spin and start several times. The person putting my hard drive in says there is some possibility he could put the new hard drive in with the machine on so that I could transfer from one hard drive to another, but we are concerned there could be dammage to my system or it might just turn off during the process. My question is: is there some way I can transfer my current linux system to the new hard drive, then take the old hard drive out and put the new one where the old one was. Only I assume I'd have to partition the hard drive first which would make thos partitions hdb-- during the transfer. I really am dragging my feet about re-installing from scratch because (1) I'll have to use speakup instead of brltty as my rescue and root disk for debian of course don't have brltty and I haven't worked on doing that yet; (2) the speakup-enabled versions of debian are about two releases behind the current potato release and I've been on woody, so I'll have a bunch of upgrading to do; and (3) the last time I had to install completely my ethernet couldn't be set up from the rescue and root disk and I had to use ppp, but I've since removed my internal modem so I'll have to find a friend to borrow an external modem from if I have to revert to ppp instead of my nice fast dsl ethernet connection. If anybody can think of a way I can transfer my current system or can tell me how I can get my ethernet up and working so I can use that to do the package installs, I would appreciate it. I haven't bought a cdrom set since the first potato release, but maybe this is a good reason to keep them up-to-date; if I had purchased the latest one, I could use cdrom for the package installing that now has to be done by ppp or ethernet. Guess I learned something for the future, but it isn't helpful right at this moment. I'm not meaning to be a complainer; just would like to find an easier way out of this if I can. Thanks. Cheryl