Bob Parks writes
Could very well be - the eduunix.ccut.edu is very good and I will go with your theory. I will be interested to know just how you rsync to the 143 gig and then make it bootable.
I did it here. My laptop froze to death. I bought a desktop, and put the disk from the laptop in it, and booted from the laptop disk. After initalizing the desktop disk on /dev/sdb, (making sure I put in a swap) I mounted the main part of it to /vol, then rsync -va --exclude /vol --exclude /proc --exclude /sys / /vol Then grub-install --directory /vol/boot/grub /dev/sdb Edited /vol/etc/fstab, putting in the right device for the swap, hopefully, (did work after a few tries ;-) Put laptop disk out, put desktop disk in its place, bingo. In nebka, the rsnyc is likely to fail. Therefore rid stop shutdown -h now boot in single user, mount / readonly. e2fsck -c -y /dev/sda say, to use the badblack program to check the disk, mark the bad block as bad so that they don't turn up in the filesystem. If my theory is correct, and no other bad block appears (2 big ifs), you can start with the rsync. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel phone: +7 383 330 6813 skype: thomaskrichel