Grub, Suse and broken hard disks

From: vKp (asso101_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 12/01/04 

Date: Wed, 01 Dec 2004 19:36:04 +0000

I'm having problems with GRUB and a failing hard-disk under SuSe.

I have a winXP/SuSe 8.1 dual-boot system. It boots using Grub. I very
rarely boot into SuSe (due to lack of support for my modem) so have not
learned as much about the admin side of Linux as I had hoped.

I have 2 hard disks. One only has an XP (fat32) partition, the other has
a large fat32 partition and the linux partition (unsure of file system
type). When I installed SuSe, it installed GRUB to handle the dual-boot
options. Unfortunately my hard-disk with linux on it is failing rapidly
(it will likely fail completely within the next week).

The problem: I have no idea which drive (the one that still works or the
one that is failing with linux on it) the boot stuff happens from. I
have a new drive to replace the failing one, but don't want to swap them
around in case the failing one has boot information and dies completely.

What can I do? What information do I need to know? If there is anything
you need to know to help diagnose, please say. I will provide any
information necessary (if it's admin-y, you might need to specify how to
get such information).

I'm not bothered about losing the SuSe partition (I'll create a fresh
partition of a new version on the new drive), but the Fat32 partition
has a lot of valuable information I need to get onto the new drive
before it dies.

Any help or pointers you can provide would be appreciated.
Thanks,
vKp.

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