[TriLUG] Replacing Hard Drive

[Joshua Gitlin]

Hey Eveyone,

So I've given up on my problematic hard drive... Almost every morning when 
I check my server it's dead, complaining of IDE errors. I've replaced 
everything else but the motherboard, and I've even switched IDE channels on 
the motherboard. So I've decided to replace my hard drive (30 gigs) with a 
21 gig drive I have. My question is, after hooking the new drive up and 
formating it... what's next? I can't just use `cp -R` to copy my existing 
linux install over to the new drive, right? I mean, won't all my /dev 
entries be lost? I can't use dd because the drives are different sizes! And 
I can't tar my entire disk because I have about 2o gigs of stuff on there 
now... where would I put the tar file? (Unless I can do `tar -c / | tar -x 
/tmp/newsystem` ?) How can I get my linux installation off my current drive 
and onto the new drive? DO I have to copy /etc and /var and just... 
reinstall? I hope not... Is there another way? Thanks guys.

-Josh