Re: LUG: New hard drive! Need help copying my data over and stuff. - Thu, 06 May 2010 10:09:47 -0400

Subject : Re: LUG: New hard drive! Need help copying my data over and stuff.

From : Richard Carter <rwcarter@ncsu.[redacted]>

Date : Thu, 06 May 2010 10:09:47 -0400

I ended up using dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda with my 500gb internal and
160gb in the USB enclosure. I opened gparted to get the sda/sdb but
saw nothing in there about copying partitions. I probably didn't look
hard enough though, as I already had my mind set on using dd.

At max USB 2.0 speed, it would theoretically take about 45 minutes to
transfer 160gb of data. I don't even know how long it took, but I
started it around 1:30 and it was still going when I went to bed
around 4. Anyway, I woke up about half an hour ago (~9:30) and it
finished (I'm now typing this on it), so I'd say it was successful.
It's possible that my drive enclosure is slow, it wasn't particularly
high-end or anything, or more likely it's just the overhead of the
drive protocol.

With my exam at 1pm today it probably wasn't the brightest idea to be
so impatient with this, so I'm going to hold off on the partitioning
stuff until tonight or tomorrow morning, even though it feels funny
using a 160gb partition on a 500gb drive. :)

Ricket

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