Hi,

Finishing up an install of Fedora Core 3, ran very tight on disk space so I'm trying to transition my install to a brand-new larger disk. Currently experiencing delays from power-on to GRUB selection screen and also on system shutdown with the new disk that far exceed what happened with the original disk...

Would appreciate any ideas on how to resolve this. Details below.

Thanks!
Don

Machine is a Dell Dimension 4100 with PIII 866MHz, 256MB DRAM.

The original disk: Western Digital ~3GB disk, ~9x% full (original FC3 install disk)
New disk: Western Digital 120GB disk

Process:

Added new disk to system as slave on same primary IDE controller as the original (which was master). BIOS sees new disk properly. Booted into FC3 OK. HW Browser reports both disks as having same geometry. Shut down.

Booted g4u 1.17 (http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/) off of the Ultimate Boot CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/). Ran command 'copydisk wd0 wd1' to create a local copy of the first disk to the second disk. Command completed OK, data looked right for image bytes transferred, etc.

Rebooted machine, came up as normal but Linux recognized that the second disk now had a redundant boot image and did not mount it. Reported right device numbers, sizes, etc. Looking good so far. Shut down machine.

Reset jumpers to reverse master and slave settings for the disks, moving the 120GB to master and 3GB to slave. Powered on machine... seems to hang during BIOS. Power down, scratch head, boot again into BIOS setup. Nothing obvious to change, BIOS sees both disks and proper master/slave jumper settings.

Reboot, no change - power down. Try removing 3GB disk from configuration (remove power and IDE cables from 3GB disk, swap former 3GB drive's IDE connector to the 120GB drive). In essence, only the 120GB disk now exists in the configuration as master, in the same connection/settings as the original 3GB.

Reboot. Seems to hang during BIOS. More head scratching. While puzzling this over (OK, swearing a bit ), after what felt like a long time a message saying something about GRUB (loading GRUB?) appears, which I've never seen before. This message stays on for a long time and then normal GRUB graphical screen appears with kernel selections. From this point, proceeds to load FC3 at normal or faster (perceived) speed than before, albeit with a [FAILED] marked on starting "smartd" - where that was not the case before w/the 3GB as boot disk and 120GB as second disk in system. Login normally and everything is working fine, seems all OK in usage.

HW Browser shows disk capacity, partitions, etc. OK, except for one thing that looks funny... there appear to be two entries for hda1 with same start-end-size info but listing different types:

is that OK? Can the same area of the disk appear twice as different things?

Start shutdown... takes 2-3x longer than w/previous disk. Try reboot of same situation, same delayed load to GRUB and shutdown from FC3.

Questions:

Is there something I need to do re: resetting GRUB to recognize the new disk in place of the original? Other action I need to take to resolve the dual entries for hda1? Any other ideas?

nothing obvious springs to mind, but you could try running fdisk and toggling the partition with /boot on it as bootable.

OK, have no idea why, but the boot issue appears to have been jumper-related. When I removed the hard disk from the IDE bus, the system would instantly boot from CD. So I tried removing the disk jumper and cabled it back in and the system booted from disk rapidly. Why it had worked before with jumpers and not later I have no idea...

The GRUB message I was seeing was "GRUB Loading stage2...", which normally goes by so fast you can't catch it.

smartd error: turns out the smartd.conf file was specifying /dev/hdb, which was no longer in the system. Edited the file to change to hda, now no longer encountering the error.

So bottom line, g4u appears to have done a great job of quickly cloning my original drive to the newer larger drive without any need to edit MBR or GRUB, etc. Cool.