Present Perfect

My home machine's hard drive had been acting flaky as of late. When booting up, sometimes the drive wouldn't spin up and would not be recognized in the BIOS some of the times. Not that terrifying, but nothing you trust to let run for months either.

To be fair, I'd more suspect the power supply to be at fault, but since I needed an extra hard drive for the Dave/Dina box anyway, since the 80 GB in that are pretty much used up, I went and bought a new 40 GB anyway. So all I had to do was copy that drive on the new one, installing the new Red Hat 7.2 as I went along.

This would also allow me to start using rh72 for the Dave/Dina box as well.

Anyways, I used ddto transfer the Windows Millenium partition I still use for games like Metal Gear and for CoolEdit. I allocated a 0.5 GB partition for MS-DOS (Sometimes I get the urge to re-play Wing Commander or Privateer or Sierragames), and I made space for a /boot partition, a / partition, a /home partition, a second / partition for future installs (I'm thinking of trying out Debian), and some swap space.

Here's some things I learnt :

• Using mkfs.vfat is just *NOT* a good way to create FAT partitions. I could only create file systems with 64k clusters, which Windows wouldn't even scandisk ! Since I wanted to re-install Me over the copied partition to make sure it worked, but it insists on running scandisk, that didn't work.
• Windows sucks at estimating copy time. I copied all of my data drive (25 GB), it started out thinking it would last 15 minutes, but then quickly rose to 180 minutes, and then alternating between the two regularly depending on the file size of the file currently being copied. In the end it lasted 6 hours.
• Use fdisk in Windows to check if the partitions you allocated are actually visible the way you want them to be. The first time I copied all of my data, I hadn't noticed that it didn't recognize the logical partition in the extended partition the way it should. So I formatted it, copied all of the data, and after rebooting I noticed I had erased my new /home partition.

So, for future reference, the quickest way to make sure you're doing it right is :

• first allocate your partitions from Linux
• install your Windows partition (or use dd if you have a previous Windows partition and you've allocated EXACTLY the right amount of space, otherwise it's a waste)
• format your data partition under Windows, MAKING SURE fdisk has the right idea of what your data partition is
• copy a few of your data files from your old partition to the new
• install Linux
• check from Linux that your Windows partitions are accessible and OK.
• copy your /home directory
• go back to Windows and copy the rest of your data. Do this just before going to work. If you're lucky it'll be ready by the time you get home.

And I thought it would be a relatively hands-off, one day process. *SIGH*

My home machine's hard drive had been acting flaky as of late. When booting up, sometimes the drive wouldn't spin up and would not be recognized in the BIOS some...