Re: LUG: New hard drive! Need help copying my data over and stuff. - Wed, 05 May 2010 22:20:49 -0400

1. I'd avoid dd. Disk dumps sound like a great idea in theory. But all of the OS hardware will change, the partition tables will change, everything in /etc will change, etc.

In order to use dd, you'd have to create an image of your hard drive (dd if=/dev/sda of=bigfile.iso), copy that image to your new computer, mount that image (mount -o loop bigfile.iso /mnt/point), and then try and copy the relevant files to your new /home dir. Slow, error-prone, takes a lot of disk space, etc.

And trying to do a disk dump from your original 160G hard drive to a partition on your 500... holy moly.

I think the most surefire way to make it work is to, on your new box: shrink windows, install linux, copy over your data files, and then bite the bullet and reinstall your windows apps. You could try copying the application data preferences manually. (If someone else has actually done it using dd, I'd also be interested in knowing how everything was done, but dd in this manner only really works on identical hardware.)

2. I couldn't give a percentage on how reliable it is to write NTFS from linux. In fact, I doubt anyone on the list has a benchmark on hand, so don't believe anyone when they respond and say that they think it is reliable.

That said, I have never had problems writing to NTFS from linux. My (non-quantitative) gut reaction is that it'll be okay.

3. I think a 10G "/" partition will probably be plenty. Perspective: Mine is 9.6G used, but I have not done a clean install for 1.5 years and have all sorts of crud (libraries, make-install code, proprietary stuff, etc etc) saved there.

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 9:38 PM, Richard Carter < rwcarter@ncsu.[redacted] > wrote:

Hey LUG,

I got my new laptop hard drive today (500gb 7200rpm!). Since I'm happy with my setup on my current drive, I want to copy it over as-is, so I also got a USB hard drive enclosure to make copying my data easy.

I have a 160gb drive right now. 100% of it is a NTFS partition (Windows 7 - unfortunately I use almost all of the 160gb so there wasn't enough room for Linux in this drive; my 320gb dual boot drive failed a couple months ago). I want to boot Ubuntu 10.04 from disc, copy the 160gb partition to the 500gb drive, expand it (probably from within Windows, to avoid problems), and install Ubuntu 10.04 in the rest.

So my questions:

- I know about the dd command, but I'm not sure exactly how I should use it to migrate my old hard drive to the new one. For example, would I copy sda->sdb, or sda1->sdb? An exact command example would be nice. I am capable of RingTFM but I'd rather get advice from a Linux expert than risk not noticing an important switch or something. Also are there any concerns copying a NTFS partition like this? I assume not, since dd is just a byte-for-byte copy, but please let me know if there's anything I should be aware of...

- Exactly how stable is the NTFS read/write in Ubuntu 10.04? Is it 110% guaranteed-not-to-corrupt-my-files stable? I often hesitate to mount my "C:\" drive from within Linux, or usually avoid it entirely, and I may add a FAT32 partition as a shared data storage if there's any reason I shouldn't trust it.

- What is the recommended size of the / partition in Ubuntu 10.04? And with my 2gb of RAM the swap should be what size?

I will probably prompt more discussion on Ubuntu 10.04 later, and if there's any possibility of a summer installfest I'll definitely be there.

Thanks in advance!

Ricket