Arch mirror to new drive [solved]

Hi guys, a newbie question here.
I wish move my current arch installation to a brand new drive using Clonezilla but the operation wasn't 100% successful. The mirroring operation from the old drive to the new one didn't give me any problems but I cannot boot into the new system. Grub lets me choose operating system (Arch or centos) but shortly after it gets stuck, throwing errors like: "failed to parse block device name for /dev/sda1".
I've tried editing my menu.lst by mounting the partition via Arch live-cd (but I don't really see why I have to change anything at all). The menu.lst file looks exactly the same as my old/current Arch's ditto. I also tried changing the UUID in root=/dev/uuid etc into root=/dev/sda1 but no joy. A desperate and probably long shot solution (at least in my mind!) was to generate a new mkinitcpio but that failed too saying it cannot find /boot/grub/kernel26 etc.
Did I miss something?
The reason for me wanting to move my Arch installation is that my Seagate is way too loud. The new drive is from Samsung. Same size. Supposedly quieter.
Any ideas?
Edit: the mkinitcpio is untouched, it's supposed to find all pata, scsi, sata etc.
Thanks in advance.
Last edited by new2arch (2009-04-20 17:33:57)

dobedo wrote:Something helpfull in this thread? http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=64027
Thanks for the tip. Will give it a try when I get back home today.
Possibly the mkinitcpio command didn't work as it should since I couldn't chroot into the new drive's partition for some reason (following the Arch Wiki, how to chroot). But I have to give it another shot checking out Blazercist's how-to.
"Anyhow this is basically what needs to be done to correct the problem.
1. Boot ArchLive
2. mkdir /media/disk
3. mount /dev/sdxX /media/disk
4. chroot /media/disk
5. mkinitcpio -k 2.6.28-ARCH -g /boot/kernel26.img
6. nano /boot/grub/menu.lst
7. Replace any references to UUID with /dev/sdxX (where xX represents your drive and partition) instead, save and exit nano.
8. reboot
Make sure and pay attention to the output of the mkinitcpio command in my step 5. If there are any errors relating to one or more of the hooks you'll need to edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and remove the hook it complains about !!IF POSSIBLE!!. I for example had some problem with the autodetect hook which caused my regular kernel to fail to create an image.
If mkinicpio doesn't complain and tells you it SUCCEEDED generating the images then you should be good to go."
Last edited by new2arch (2009-04-20 11:12:05)

Similar Messages

How to fix Grub after moving arch to new drive [SOLVED]

I moved my Arch install (/ and /home partitions) to a new drive and I was wondering how to fix Grub so that it knows /boot is on the new drive. What I've done thus far is
create partitions on the new drive and dd my current / and /home partitions to them. The new partitions are bigger than the current ones, so I also re-sized the filesystems to fill the new partitions. My disk/partition setup is the following
/dev/sda1 2048 488392703 488390656 232.9G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT (Storage)
/dev/sdb1 * 2048 206847 204800 100M 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT (System reserved)
/dev/sdb2 206848 102402047 102195200 48.7G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT (Windows 7)
/dev/sdb3 * 102402048 141472127 39070080 18.6G 83 Linux (Current Arch /)
/dev/sdb4 141472128 250069679 108597552 51.8G 83 Linux (Current Arch /home)
/dev/sdc2 * 206848 105064447 104857600 50G 83 Linux (New Arch /)
/dev/sdc3 105064448 234441647 129377200 61.7G 83 Linux (New Arch /home)
After I resized the filesystems, I then created a new grub.cfg file (on /dev/sdb3) that is aware of the new Arch system. I can boot to both my current and new Arch installs and run them fine, but ultimately I want to remove the current Arch install so I can make more room for my Windows 7 install. What do I need to do to grub, so it knows to use the new Arch system.
Last edited by tlawren (2014-08-17 21:42:46)

@Xyne - Thanks! Installing grub on my /dev/sdc did the trick. Because I dd'ed my old setup to a new drive, /boot/grub was already populated, so all I had to do was install and configure grub on the new drive via the following.
grub-install --target=i386-pc --recheck --debug /dev/sdx
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
I used os-prober to find the other OS's (Windows 7 and my old Arch). After some testing, I will wipe my old Arch setup and then resize Windows into the free space.

Running Arch from a usb drive[SOLVED]

I am trying to install arch on a usb drive with ext3 format. I have entered root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/... on the kernel line and in /etc/fstab file (as mentioned in the wiki). On booting I am dropped to a limited shell with few linux commands. On running 'blkid' there, I find that the fixed computer hard disk is detected as sda1,2 etc and usb drive is not being detected at all. The results are similar if I use root=/dev/disk/by-label/..
How can I boot from the usb drive.
Last edited by rnarch (2012-03-24 15:38:08)

My menu.lst:
# (0) Arch Linux
title Arch Linux
root (hd0,0)
#kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Kingston_DT_101_G2_001CC0EC32C7BAB1B7DE00ED-0:0-part1 ro
#initrd /boot/kernel26.img
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Kingston_DT_101_G2_001CC0EC32C7BAB1B7DE00ED-0:0-part1 ro
initrd /boot/initramfs-linux.img
# (1) Arch Linux
title Arch Linux Fallback
root (hd0,0)
#kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Kingston_DT_101_G2_001CC0EC32C7BAB1B7DE00ED-0:0-part1 ro
#initrd /boot/kernel26-fallback.img
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Kingston_DT_101_G2_001CC0EC32C7BAB1B7DE00ED-0:0-part1 ro
#kernel /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=0811 type=ext3 ro
initrd /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img
and mkinitcpio.conf HOOKS variable:
HOOKS="base udev pata scsi sata usb filesystems"
Hope those would help, good luck!

Best way of going about re-installing arch on a new Drive?

I'm moving from a magnetic Hard-Drive installation of Arch, to installing Arch on an SSD.
What I'm mainly concerned about, is about the best way of re-installing everything from scratch.
Regarding home directory I can just copy it.
But regarding installed packages from official repositories and AUR -
Is it advisable to find a way to list all packages to a text file, then use that text file as in input to pacman and yaourt on the new installation in order to install everything?
Did anybody here already faced this problem? I'm afraid of reinventing the wheel.
Any help is greatly appreciated!
Thanks!

cacplate wrote:
you can use
pacman -Qqet > packages.txt
to list packages that are explicitely installed and are not required by any other packages and make a file of this list.
Generaly, this list contains everything that you want to keep and more.
After that, you can script something to pipe every line to pacman and adding --needed to avoid reinstalling anything.
Explicitly installed packages which are dependencies of others will not appear in that list and thus lead to a different set of install reasons. The command should be pacman -Qqe instead. The safest way to do this is as follows:
old system
pacman -Qqen > explicit_native_pkgs.txt
pacman -Qqem > explicit_foreign_pkgs.txt
new system
pacman -Syu - < explicit_native_pkgs.txt
random_aur_helper ... $(cat explicit_foreign_pkgs.txt)

Dual boot arch from second hard drive [SOLVED]

I have two sata hard drives connected. Hard drive 0 has my working updated version of arch.
I'm trying to boot off the second hard drive that has an older installation of arch. I have added this to my menu.lst of my first hard drive:
# (2) Arch Linux 2.6.31
title Arch Linux 2.6.31
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/29523114-ab52-4a9b-b93f-e2da915c0dc1 ro vga=773
initrd /kernel26.img
I have also tried using /dev/sdb1 on the kernel line with the same results. The uuid is correct I am able to obtain that from /dev/disk/by-uuid/
this is definately where the vmlinuz26 file resides for that hard drive. I can mount it and see it.
But when I choose this option, it tries to boot but then I get:
kinit: init not found!
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
Pid: 1, comm: init not tainted 2.6.31-ARCH #1
What do I need to change? Do I need to add something to that initrd line? Thanks.
Last edited by kekules_dream (2010-01-10 21:43:31)

I had to change the uuid to that of the root partition on sdb (the second hard drive) even though I had a /boot partition on it (sdb1). It is now working.
# (2) Arch Linux 2.6.31
title Arch Linux 2.6.31
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/4a5827bc-6ace-4d4d-9ba7-24586e365c8a ro vga=773
initrd /kernel26.img

Lenovo G480 Problem: I cant Create a new Drive

Hi everyone.. so my my laptop is a Lenovo G480 intel i3
4GB ram
My operating System when i bought this was Windows 7 Home Basic.
So my problem is that my Local Disk C is 420 GB while my Local Disk D is only 25.4 GB
So I want my disk D to have more space (atleast 150GB) so I could store all my Installers, Games, Music and Videos in there, but when i try to transfer the memory from C to D, it wont. I shrink 150GB from my Local Disk C and when i clicked on Local Disk D the option Extend Volume is not available. So i tried to create a new drive instead.. I right click the 150GB unallocated space and the only option available is Create Simple Drive (i think). then i agreed at all the options but in the end it would say Not Enough Space.
I dont understand. So I tried changing the Operating System to Win7 Ultimate but same problem. Please Help Me I dont know what to do (and by the way it can also not be done when im installing Win7. The option Extend is also not present there or Create new Drive)
Solved!
Go to Solution.

you need not to go to diskmgmt.msc as you have already messed up enough with your HDD. now wipe out you system reserved, C and D partition (I mean all created partitions leaving the OEM reserved partition viz "LENOVO_PART") booting from windows 7 DVD. At one page there will be drive option when you see your all partitions. click that "Drive Option" and now delete one by one all partitions leaving "lenovo_part" one untouched.
now create your required partitions of your size. system reserved partition of 100 MB will be automatically created when you create your first (C) drive.

[SOLVED] Dual-boot Arch/Windows - 2 hard drives

Hi Everyone
I've just installed Arch and I'm having a bit of a problem dual-booting between Arch and Windows XP, which are each on a seperate Hard drive.
I've done this successfully before with Mepis Linux and Windows XP, but for some reason it's not working this time.
The difference is that I've recently purchased a new computer and both Windows and Arch are on SATA drives whereas last time they were both on IDE drives. Also I'm not sure whether or not to enable SATA AHCI mode in the BIOS (apparently it doesn't work with XP anyways), or SATA port 0-3 Native mode. Although I've tried all possible combinations and it doesn't seem to work at all.
Here is my menu.lst file:
# (0) Arch Linux
title Arch Linux
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/0df05d3b-537c-4576-ad36-1f90a6b01ec0 ro vga=773
initrd /boot/kernel26.img
# (1) Windows
title Windows
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
When I boot into Arch from Grub it works fine, but when I try to boot into Windows from Grub, I get this:
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
and then nothing....No error message or anything. It just hangs. Does anyone have any ideas as to what's happening? Thanks in advance.
edit: It seems I solved the problem by adding these lines to the menu.lst file:
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
root (hd1,0)
I can now boot into either Arch or Windows from the Grub menu
Last edited by axle (2008-09-30 02:35:54)

This is a question that can very easily be answered by doing a simple google serach. Google is your friend. I suggest you start there and come back if you run into issues.

How do I erase an older Western Digital 1TB mirrored hard drive? Newer drives can be erased via a WD Utility, but the WD site says to "ask Apple" about the older ones.

I have a MacBook Pro with OSX 10.7.5. The hard drive is approx. six years old - a Western Digital for Macs, mirrored with 1TB on each half.
Because the drive is "infected" with Time Machine backups that I can't erase, I have removed all important files from the drive and now want to wipe it clean. I've done this with new drives, via the WD Utility that came with the drive, but the older drive doesn't have such a utility. The WD site only has a protocol for PCs.
I find nothing on the Apple site itself. Can you community members help??
(I've tried various ways of deleting the Time Machine backups, but nothing has worked. The instructions for that, which I read on a community support site, were too advanced for me to understand. A Mac IT guy tried to erase the backups, but he didn't know how either. So that is why I'm erasing the drive totally. I've learned my lesson and have a dedicated Time Machine drive now.)

Please be clear:
This is a mirrored RAID that you use as the startup disk?
You now have a different startup disk and wish to erase the RAID mirror?
Do you wish to continue using the RAID for backup?
If all you want to do is erase the RAID to get rid or the Time Machine backups, the use Disk Utility to erase the mirror disk mounted on the Desktop.

How do I add a new drive to a degraded MIRRORED RAID set?

My mirrored raid said it was degraded because one of the drives had a failure.
Today I unplugged the faulty drive and inserted a new one.
So far so good.
I erased the new drive.
Then I went into disk utility and followed the instructions in the help about RAID but I cannot see how to add this new drive to the RAID.
I'm confused.
1) The data is all on the RAID (the good, original slice) so can I add a new slice?
2) how do I do it?
Many thanks

I don't recommend the Apple hardware RAID card, and it doesn't work with off the shelf drives. If you are using drives in RAID, first make sure they are RAID Edition or lacking that Enterprise. Same make/model/firmware.
If using Seagate, avoid anything prior to 7200.12 series. If WD the RE2/3 series.
Rebuilds are slow, and one reason why I recommend 3 drives, even if you lose one you are covered still.
Of course just having two backups per volume is more important and comes first; mirrors are great for live editing and recording (audio) but otherwise... I'd stick to stripe and redundant backups. Only if you need 24/7. Otherwise, forget mirror.

Broken MSI 3870 OC by some new driver [Catalyst 9.10] [Solved]

Hi all, Well the videocard was fried, I did a look at it and I don't know what is broken but it just doesnt work anymore.
I finished buying a new videocard.

Quote from: belhot92 on 02-November-09, 07:01:10
I've bought this videocard like an year ago and till the moment it was working ok.
One year later when I went to install the Ati catalyst drivers 9.10 as all the drivers you download for the vga must be from the ati website (because they have the most updated drivers to day and bla bla bla..) I found out the other day, after shutting the computer down that I had no post screen and no boot screen
When I put the computer on I just received 11 beeps and no boot..
I installed a normal Pci video card and the computer started up with no problems.
I still can't believe it got broken by some catalyst drivers..
I think that that can be RMA'd as a driver broke my card.
The driver wasn't even beta..
It was a new driver like when most of the new drivers come out.
This is simply a coincidence. Whether you updated the driver or not - your card was going to die.
I think your PSU would run a 5770. I'm not sure of the exact figures, however.

Disk utility reports "Device could not be opened" - error when trying to format a new drive in a Mac Pro 1,1

MacPro 1,1 Quadcore 3 GHz (2006 "Woodcrest")
32 GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 5770
OS X 10.7.5 Lion
I have encountered the following behavior when trying to format a new drive with disk utility. This description has also been send via the Mac Pro feedback as a bug report to Apple.
On searching the web and forums with this particular error message and behaviour I could not find any usful results. So maybe the following description may be helpful for some users.
Best regards.
1. Drive Bay 1 contains the original 250 GB Startupdisk. It works without errors.
2. Drive Bays 3 and 4 contain each a WD Caviar Black 2 TB SATA 3 HDD. They work without errors.
3. I have purchased a third WD Caviar Black 2 TB HDD.
4. In Drive Bay 2 there has been a Seagate 750 GB HDD, which worked in conjunction with all the other drives without error.
5. I exchanged the Seagate HDD in Drive Bay 2 with the new WD Caviar Black 2 TB HDD.
6. On starting the system, it will report to initialize the new drive.
7. On trying to initialize the new drive with disk utility it reports the error [translated from German] "Erasing of the volume has failed. The device could not be opened."
8. I thought that the drive is faulty. Thus I created an RMA-Case at WD. They exchanged the drive without problems.
9. On getting the exchanged WD Caviar Black 2 TB drive I put it in Drive Bay 2 as before.
10. On trying to erase and format the exchange drive I got the same error message "Drive could not be opened."
10.1 On selecting the physical drive in the devices list, disk utility reports all information in the bottom area of its window as usual, e. g. hard disk description, connection bus, type and place, capacity, write status, SMART-status, partition scheme.
10.1 On leaving that drive selected in the devices list and clicking the info-button, disk utility will also report additional information as usual, e. g. Name, Type, partition scheme, media-identification, media name, media type, device tree, … , number of relocated sectors, etc.. All this information appears to be valid, as can be compared to the other devices information inside the other Drive Bays. Also the disk numbering scheme appears to be standard - 4 HDDs give the numbering disk0, disk1, disk2, disk3.
10.2 From that information I conclude that the SATA-bus and connectors electrically work properly, the drive has spun up and can be accessed by the system normally.
11. I powered down the computer, took out the HDDs from Drive Bays 3 and 4 and put the caddy with the new exchange drive in Drive Bay 4 [Maybe, I could have also just left it alone in Drive Bay 2, or 3].
12. After powering on the system, disk utility will quick format the exchange drive without any error message. Also, when erasing again by selecting the option to write zeros to the drive, disk utility will finish without error.
13. After disk utility finished formatting, I put back the original drives into Drive Bay 3 and 4 and put the now newly formatted drive back into Drive Bay 2.
14. After switching on the computer the system start and login proceeds without any error message. All drives appear as expected on the desktop.

If anyone is reading this still looking for what caused the issue and how to fix it here is what I discovered.
The antivirus program our company uses, Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, was causing some of the PDF files not to open. After troubleshooting the different modules and settings the culprit was..
Scan SSL in Privacy Control Settings. Turning it OFF solved the problem and all the PDF files that previously would not open now open just fine. This issue has been sent to Bitdefender for them to review. If you use a different antivirus program and are having this issue try locating the Scan SSL setting and see if turning it off solves the problem.

How to add a new drive to my server

I have an HP ProLiant ML350 G6, in the front HDD rack i have some unused slots and i would like to fill them up with some new drives. How do i do that? I don't have a "cage" where to put a standard 3.5" drive, so i wonder if i need to buy the whole cage+drive package.
Also, can i organize the drives in any way i want, making more than one RAID volume with a single rack and a single raid card? i guess yes, but i want to be sure, and asking is free
thank you
This question was solved.
View Solution.

Hi,
This is the HP Consumer forum and we don't deal with servers and Linux.
HP doesn’t have an official presence on this forum other than for administration and moderation. The assistance that you receive is mainly from volunteers.
You might get better assistance on the HP Enterprise Business Forum since you have a business class PC.
However, these manuals may be helpful.
HP DV9700, t9300, Nvidia 8600, 4GB, Crucial C300 128GB SSD
HP Photosmart Premium C309G, HP Photosmart 6520
HP Touchpad, HP Chromebook 11
Custom i7-4770k,Z-87, 8GB, Vertex 3 SSD, Samsung EVO SSD, Corsair HX650,GTX 760
Custom i7-4790k,Z-97, 16GB, Vertex 3 SSD, Plextor M.2 SSD, Samsung EVO SSD, Corsair HX650, GTX 660TI
Windows 7/8 UEFI/Legacy mode, MBR/GPT

Transparent integration of a new drive into the folder structure of a file server?

Hallo,
I'm looking for solution to a problem, that seams to be simple, but obviously is not that easy to solve:
I have to integrate a second external RAID system in to our MacOS X 10.6.8 Server based file sharing server that is accessed from Mac and Windows clients via AFP and SMB. I want to move one or two main folders from the old RAID to the new one, but this physical change has to be invisible to the users, as I don't want to confuse anyone.
So my idea was to mover the Folders to the new drive, and create symbolic links at the old locations pointing to the new locations. This works very well for the Windows clients accessing the server via SMB, but does not work for the Macs on AFP.
So I tried to move one folder to the new drive and mount it at the old location. Again this works fine for the SMB but does not work for AFP, the mount point does not show up in a directory listing via AFP.
Do you have any other idea how I might integrate the new drive in transparent way into the old folder structure?
Thanks for your input
Florian
PS: I could use SMB on the Macs but for some reason I, whenever I try to log into the server from a Mac via SMB, user name and password are accepted, but then the Mac client displays a message saying that I don't have the right to access the share. The same share works using AFP.

Define 'invisible' please.
Do you mean you need to be able to do this live, while users are on the system? or just that you can shut the machine down, reconfigure it, and bring it back up with the new configuration, even though the shares look the same to the users?
I'm guessing the latter, but it's worth asking.
Ultimately the problem lies in the way the file sharing systems deal with multi-volume sharepoints, and it's not easy. If you think about it, say you have a 1TB array handling the main sharepoint and you want to substitute one of the directories in that sharepoint with a new, empty 4TB array.
When the user mounts the sharepoint they get a little status bar at the bottom of the window showing the available space... how much is that? Well, initially it would be however much of the 1TB volume is unused... except if they switch to the linked directory they now have 4TB available (or thereabouts)... so the amount of space available has changed even though, from the user's standpoint, they're still on the same share.
It isn't valid for the OS to report 4 TB as free because that isn't the case unless you're in this specific directory.
It also isn't valid for the OS to report 5TB free, even though there is that amount of space altogether.
It also isn't valid for the OS to report 1TB free because you could upload 4TB of data if you put it in the right place.
There are few solutions to this. Microsoft sort of addressed this with their DFS solution in Windows Server, but it's not trivial.
Unfortunately you can't just blow it off and ignore the issue.
Off hand there's only one thing I can think of that *might* work. if it doesn't then you're down to using multiple sharepoints on the server, with users mounting both disks simultaneously (which can be automated, for what it's worth).
The one thing to try is to statically mount the second RAID at the appropriate location so that, as far as the OS is concerned, it looks like just another directory even though it's on a different disk. You'd do this by editing /etc/fstab and adding a line like
UUID=AABBCCDD-79F7-33FF-BE85-41DFABE2E2BA /path/to/mount hfs rw
to /etc/fstab (this file may not currently exist, so just create it as root).
The first field is the UUID of the drive (which you can get via diskutil info)
The second field is the path where you want this drive to appear in the filesystem - i.e. somewhere in the path of your sharepoint. There must be an existing (empty) directory at this path when the disk mounts.
The third field identifies the disk as HFS
The fourth field marks the disk as read-write
Now when the system boots it should locate this disk and mount it on top of the existing RAID volume. If you cd to your sharepoint you should see the existing drive and if you cd from there into your mounted directory you should be looking at your new RAID.
Now, this all works fine (or, at least, should do) from a standard OS standpoint. The big question is whether the AFP and SMB daemons honor and support this kind of setup... there's one way to try, of course...
Now for testing purposes you could mount it at a dummy directory, just to see whether it's available to network clients. If it is then your next step would be to clone the data from the directory onto the new drive, then edit the fstab to mount the disk at the appropriate location.
Note also that the entire volume will replace the directory you mount over - that means you can't replace two (or more) directories with one volume, but you can, of course, partition or setup your RAID into multiple volumes and mount each individual volume over a specific directory.

How do I move my current hard drive OS and data to a new drive for internal installation?

I want to replace my Macbook Pro 500GB Hard Drive with a 2TB Hard Drive. How do I make this new drive bootable and a replica of my current drive programs and data? I also want to upgrade the OS. Is it best to mirror the drive and then upgrade the OS, or can I put the new OS on the new drive and then clone the old drive onto it?

For starters I would do this one step at a time. It is far easier to check out where the problems are when they develop that way.
My first step would be to backup everything that you have now as a first step. Just in case of problems later.
Next, I would suggest to place the new 2TB disk drive in an enclosure and format it to Mac OS Extended and GUID partition mapping first.
Once that is done you can create a bootable clone on the 2TB disk drive using either CCC or SuperDuper.
Then test to be sure the 2TB is bootable.
Then move the 2TN disk drive into the Mac.
Once you have done that and it boots them you can upgrade the operating system.

Finder issue - formatting new drive

I bought a single drive G5 running 10.4.10 (no disks included) off ebay. Before long, I began getting finder errors and mirror agent errors? I bought a new internal drive and Tiger 10.4, thinking I could pull everything off the original drive before it failed completely. During the setup, it asked about using the same keys and I agreed. I'm having the same issues now and can't get the computer to boot off the new drive. Did I make a fatal error allowing the old keys to be used on the new drive? I also let the computer copy off all files etc from the old to the new drive. I'm thinking erasing the new drive and starting over. Should I just re-load 10.4 on the original drive as well? Thanks for any tips.

You can copy them, burn them to CD, etc. I would run Disk Warrior (or TechTool Pro) to check files.
I keep any updaters, installers that were on disk images or downloaded always backed up; on DVD; etc. including any Apple software updates (I only use standalone updates from Apple, too).
I can understand wanting to insure it works. I don't understand someone selling a system - one with 10.4.10 no less - without disks, though. At least now you do and this way you know it is legit retail Apple DVD Installer.
As for failing drive, 70% or more can still have a good life - maybe only for backups - after using Disk Utility Erase Security Option: Zero-All.

Arch mirror to new drive [solved]

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for