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how to replace a hard drive without losing the boot loader

Asked by Jerry Story

I have 2 internal hard drives.
Windows Vista is on sda1.
Ubuntu 9.10 is on sdb1.

Both work perfectly at present. But 9.10 tells me that sda is failing with about 200,000 bad sectors and it tells me to backup the data on sda and replace the hard drive. (I had Vista try to fix the bad sectors.)

Question:
How can I replace the hard drive without losing the boot loader, which I assume is on sda?

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tjagoda (tjagoda) said : 		#1

The boot loader is controlled by the MBR of sda. It may be easier for you to just re-install the bootloader after your new hard disk is in (this can be done from an Ubuntu liveCD).

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Sam_ (and-sam) said : 		#2

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Reinstalling%20GRUB%202

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Sam_ (and-sam) said : 		#3

For the record:
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/98172

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