Web Site Test Box

I spent the last few days organizing my home office. I have five computers in there, not counting this laptop, which goes back and forth. There's a Windows XP box, which is primarily for graphics-intensive stuff, an old IBM Netvista for my Linux workstation sandbox, a 700MHz Dell I'm preparing for use at the deaf computer club in my son's high school, a dinky old iMac DV slot loader (G3 450MHz), and my old Linux test server, which has been the trouble maker. Turns out the hard drive, and the floppy drive went South at the same time. That was a fiddle to figure out. Who expects the floppy drive to fail these days? Once I ascertained it wasn't the motherboard, but the floppy drive, I was able to get in and fix the hard drive problems - the boot sector was corrupt, and some strange intermittent problem is causing the arm to bang against the stop. It doesn't do it all the time, so it passes all the hard drive tests I can throw at it. Now I'm just replacing it, and that's what this is about.

Problem: Replace old hard drive with smaller hard drive I had on the shelf.
NOTE: While the drive was smaller, 13Gig vs 8Gig, the data was not too big for the new drive. Basically it's a multihomed Debian Web server answering several non-routable IP's, and host names that I use for testing, and demonstrating client's projects. I'm about to need this for a moderately involved Drupal project.

First Approach: Clone the old hard drive using Linux tools
NOTE: Here I was trying different things, and ran across an interesting project at Sourceforge called Ghost for Linux, or G4L, that attempts to duplicate Symantec's Ghost functionality with GPL tools. It's a very interesting project, which does what it says, but there's one feature left to implement - cloning from a larger drive to a smaller one. Symantec Ghost will clone to a smaller drive correctly, resizing as it goes.

Second Approach: Recreate an appropriate structure on the new hard drive, and just copy the files across from the old one. This is boring, very slow, and I have to manually reinstall Grub, but it will work, and it's a no-brainer.