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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: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @08:21PM
"What does linux do that your current setup does not?"
Not get infected by viruses. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
I do however totally agree with making an image of the old drive ASAP.
The "Rellocated Sector count" means that the SMART drive is running out of space in the table that it uses to relocate data from bad sectors, soon it will start to lose data. And the "Spin Retry" indicates that the main motor is failing. The drive will be a paper weight in short order.
ddrescue is definitely the best tool for the job IMHO (backed by 30 years working with computer hardware). Not only can it ignore seek errors it does a fantastic job of recovering every possible bit of data from a drive. I've had it recover 100% of user data from drives that had the "Click of Death".
ddrescue also has the huge advantage of creating an image that can be mounted or even turned into a virtual HD for use in virtualbox (another great program). If the old OS still boots you can create a VM with minimal effort.
Yes I know there are other recovery programs that can create mountable images but ddrescue is alway the first one I use, and I've never had to try another recovery program because ddrescue gets the job done.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @09:38PM
[Linux does] Not get infected by viruses. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
There's no reason to apologize.
There are a lot of folks who make the move for exactly that reason.
Not having to do reboots for no good reason is another reason.
Escaping a company that pushes "critical" updates that are only critical to that company's business model is another good reason.
Raids by the Business Software Alliance (a M$ proxy) where your company can be dinged tens of thousands of dollars is another reason.
Most recently, the revelations that MSFT puts back doors into their software and hands over the keys to those to USA's snooper agencies is another good reason.
.
What does linux *DO* that windows does not?
The better question is "What WON'T Linux do for $0 that M$'s payware treadmill will?".
Since he wants to keep a Windoze install, even that is moot.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday July 10 2015, @03:00AM
Thanks for the feedback. You confirmed my suspicions on the Relocated Sector Count, and I wasn't certain as to the 'Spin Retry' count -- very helpful!
That seems to be a pretty unanimous choice -- thanks for the info. Also, I was unaware that the backup image could be converted/used as a virtual HD for use in virtual box -- thanks again!
Wit is intellect, dancing.