We have had this problem a few times. A drive tells us it is thinking about dying, and we need to replace it, very fast.
If you have a drive that is the same size (exact, don't think two 2T drives are necessarily the same size) or larger, the simplest thing to do is plug them into a computer, then use the dd command. Assume /dev/sdf is the original drive, and /dev/sdg is the drive you want to clone it to. Be sure you know which drive is which.
lsblk # read the output of this and MAKE SURE you know which is the original and which is the replacement fdisk -l /dev/sdf #now, use fdisk to MAKE SURE you know which is the original and which is the replacement fdisk -l /dev/sdg #now, use fdisk to MAKE SURE you know which is the original and which is the replacement # at this point, you should know for sure which is which. I hope dd if=/dev/sdf of=/dev/sdg
The last command will take hours on a large drive. It takes, on my laptop, about 30 minutes on a 16G USB Thumbdrive. And, if it fails, you get to start over.
If you want feedback, at the cost of a little bit of speed, you can use pv to give you a thermometer bar. The 2T in the following command tells pv that we will be transferring 2 terabytes of data:
dd if=/dev/sdf | pv -petrs 2T | dd of=/dev/sdg
This has not been tested. Do not use before we have a chance to test it
# plug old drive in, see what the letter is (sda here) # plug new drive in, see what the letter is (sdb here) # copy partition sfdisk -d /dev/sda | sfdisk /dev/sdb # create a file system mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1 # if you have a second partition, do the same for it mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1 # mount sda1 on /mnt/sda, sdb1 on /mnt/sdb mkdir /mnt/sda mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda mkdir /mnt/sdb mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb # copy all the files cp -av /mnt/sda/* /mnt/sdb # unmount everthing, remove devices umount /dev/sda umount /dev/sdb # plug NEW drive back in and see what it's name is (sda here) # then mount it mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/sda #IF you have a separate boot partition, mount it correctly #mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda/boot # now, we need to mount some stuff from the running system so we can # do a chroot mount --bind /dev /mnt/sda/dev mount --bind /sts /mnt/sda/sys mount --bind /proc /mnt/sda/proc # put yourself in a chroot jail chroot /mnt/sda # verify fstab is correct, ie change required mount points vi /etc/fstab # change any required mount points #vi /etc/default/grub*WHATEVER* .... sorry - I don't remember these specifics either -- but you really need to point at the right boot device # install grub on the thumbdrive update-grub # leave chroot jail exit # umount everything umount /mnt/sda/proc umount /mnt/sda/sys umount /mnt/sda/dev umount /mnt/sda/boot umount /mnt/sda # remove the drive and try it out.