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Summary: I'm trying to back up a failing harddisk and bring programs over to a new system. I'd also like to transition off Windows. I'm hoping my fellow Soylentils can share their experiences and help ease the transition. I realize I'm probably not the only person who may be looking to do such things, so I'm hoping that the replies will be helpful to someone who later comes upon this story.
Background: I have a 10-year-old HP laptop with an AMD Athlon64 3200+ running Windows XP/SP3 with an 80 GB hard disk Over the past 10 years I've installed well over 100 programs and done countless tweaks and modifications to their defaults. Thanks to the generosity of a kind friend, I'm getting a Dell Latitude with a fresh install of Win 7 Pro which has an Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53GHz and a 500 GB hard disk.
Goal: Full-disk backups of both systems and as-painless-as-possible installation of programs on the new system. Ultimately transition off Windows to a Linux/BSD distro.
Challenges: When I run SMART on the HP's 80 GB disk, it reports "Prefailure" for: "Raw Read Error Rate", "Spin Up Time", "Reallocated Sector Count", "Seek Error Rate", and "Spin Retry Count." A couple years ago, I tried doing a full-disk backup. In preparation, I did a CHKDSK /R to relocate bad sectors and fix any other errors. Then I ran a Live CD version of Clonezilla (2.0.1-5-i486) to backup the disk to an external USB hard disk; it happily chewed along for several hours until it hit a disk error and then just stopped. I'd like to use something which is more determined to retry challenged sectors and not die on any errors — ideally it would report details on any non-recoverable sectors, etc.
As for installing my old programs on the new machine, I surely miss the pre-registry days when one could just zip up a directory on one machine, unzip it on another, and you were good to go! Example: I use Pale Moon as my browser. I've set customizations for fonts, character sets, etc. as well as having updated the internal spelling dictionary. What is the easiest way to bring the program over to the new system? Similarly, how would I bring over such programs as: Mozilla Thunderbird, PuTTY, HexChat, and VLC?
Lastly: I'd like to get off the Windows merry-go-round. I have considerable experience in using Unix userland commands (ls, find, gawk, sed, etc.) but negligible experience in installing Linux/BSD/etc. The new box has sufficient memory (6 GB) that I could conceivably run Windows in a VM. I've never done that on a PC before. (Many years ago I worked at IBM testing their VM operating system, so I'm familiar with the concepts.) So, I'm open to folks' experience on how to go about doing a P2V (physical to virtual) of the new system. Based on what I've read, I'd like to stay away from systemd, so that strikes out a few of the selections mentioned in: What Distro Do Soylentils Use? What has your experience been? What do you recommend?
I know there's probably something I don't know; what else should I be asking? What problems should I watch out for?
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @06:01PM
Don't chkdsk, don't boot the disk, don't attach it to a Windows system, don't attach it to a "user friendly" Linux system. Boot a conservative Linux Live CD like Knoppix [knopper.net], which will not touch the disk until you tell it to. Do not mount any partitions on the damaged disk. Then use dd_rescue [mankier.com] (readily available in Knoppix) to copy the entire disk (/dev/sdx, use "fdisk -l" to find the right device) into a disk image. This takes a while, depending on the size of the disk and the amount of damage, possibly more than a day. When that's done, disconnect the damaged disk and only work on the image. Depending on the importance of the data, only work on a copy of the image.
(Score: 5, Informative) by seeprime on Thursday July 09 2015, @06:10PM
A conservative suggestion based on 23 years of owning a computer shop: You might want to mount a USB flash or hard drive first and copy your readable files, before imaging the failing hard drive, as it takes little time to do this, after booting to Linux. Then image to a portable hard drive. If you hard drive dies during imaging you have nothing. I had this happen once. So, copy first then image just in case.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @06:22PM
Yes, but make sure to mount the partition read-only, or you risk further damage to the filesystem. The filesystem may already be damaged, so I would only do that if there are small amounts of data which are much more important than the rest of the disk, and you know exactly where that data is. Otherwise you're better off imaging the entire disk. Then you can use filesystem repair and recovery tools on the image, which you should absolutely not use on a damaged disk directly. Better still, just restore to a new disk from backup...