[ILUG] harddisk swap

[Cian Cullinan]

So earlier on today I was ssh'ing into a machine, just checking logs etc. and 
I went to edit a file and got back an error about the filesystem being 
read-only. True enough /proc/mounts showed 

/dev/root / ext3 ro 00

Some more looking in the logs turned up BAD news. Lots of IDE errors from 
about 4am when lots of cron stuff was happening, followed by the root 
filesystem being remounted ro, presumably trying to save itself. 
I made the mistake of trying a remote reboot and the machine never came back.
Anyway, I'm heading out to the machine tomorrow (it's about 20 minutes down 
the road) to replace the HD and hopefully recover the data from the old one.
I'll be swapping in a nice SCSI disk+controller for the crapped-out old IDE 
disk. Basically I wanted to check with the ILUG crowd if I was properly 
prepared and going about this the right way:

1) I've partitioned the SCSI disk in advance and done "mkfs.ext3 -j" on all 
partions except the swap. Will this work or will I have do something like

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 

for the MBR before I can go and partition /dev/sda?

2) I'm planning on booting from a Fire CD mounting /dev/hda partitions 
read-only and using cp to copy them to the /dev/sda partitions. Sound 
reasonable?

Any other gotchas I should be ready for?
Cheers,
Cian