Pekka K. Kurki wrote:
I have a system with two hard disks, hda hosts the system and root-user stuff, hdb hosts my other user files, etc. The hdb disk has had some problems for quite a while. Quite often, expecially when accessing different directories on it than the most commonly used ones, it makes a tickling noise and there is a temporary freeze of 10-30 secs until the disk had completed operations. But I could live with it. Now, after having installed RH9, it quite often comes to a complete freeze where I can only reboot. Obviously some action is needed.... I have still ext2 on that disk, not enough space anywhere else on the system to do a complete backup of that disk. Any suggestions about a "non-destructive repair"...???
I would suggest this: buy a nice new big disk big enough to hold a system and the stuff on the broken disk. Put it in the machine as hda and install something on it -- it doesn't much matter what it is, but RH9 is probably not a good idea based on the problems you've had with that (but think carefully about partitions, see below). Copy hdb to that disk and shut the machine down again. Remove hdb and give it to children/cats/dogs to play with. Swap the jumper around on the new disk to make it the slave and put the old hda back in the machine. Reboot.
You can now remove the old partitions and absorb them into the data partition on the new hdb. If you made your data partition at the beginning of the disk then this is all easy -- just delete the temporary install partitions at the beginning of the disk, extend the data partition into the new space and extend the underlying file system. (Make the new partition ext3 by the way.) If you're not comfortable with jiggling around partitions then buy a recent copy of PartitionMagic which understands ext2/ext3 -- it's dead easy with that, but do put the new data partition at the beginning of the disk, it's no fun moving a 60Gb partition from one end of the disk to the other.
jch
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