More Ubuntu 9.10

Earlier I noted that Ubuntu 9.10 reported my laptop hard drive was going
to fail. At first I discounted this as (1) it was reporting a crazy and
impossible 500,000+ bad sectors and (2) the drive seemed to be working
fine and other metrics didn't indicate a problem.

Well, yesterday my file system came up dirty for the second time in a
week and I reluctantly concluded there was a problem with the drive.

I got a new drive and went about restoring from a recent disk to disk
backup. All went well until I was getting ready to edit /etc/fstab and
/var/boot/menu.lst to change the UUID of the ext4 file system and
discovered the vol_id command no longer seems to be part of Ubuntu.
You really need this to restore from a full backup.

Workaround: The needed information is available at /dev/disk/by-uuid.

GRUB 2: Live CD Install Guide documents how to install GRUB into
the MBR... worked for me.