Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Thursday July 09 2015, @05:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the over-to-you dept.

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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @09:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @09:09PM (#207129)

    I've been power cycling my WD blacks for 5 years now and never had any failure. Been doing it to equipment that is from 2004, Hitachi drives....still no problems.

    Takeaway: shitty drives gonna be shitty. good drives will be fine.

    Hell: I even have a 1.5GB Maxtor that still works! [if you can IDE gear to use it with]

  • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday July 10 2015, @02:29AM

    by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Friday July 10 2015, @02:29AM (#207240)

    I've been power cycling my WD blacks for 5 years now and never had any failure. Been doing it to equipment that is from 2004, Hitachi drives....still no problems.
    Takeaway: shitty drives gonna be shitty. good drives will be fine.

    I am possibly extraordinarily lucky in this respect, but I have never had a hard drive fail. Motherboards yes, power supplies yes, but I have been able to pull out every hard drive from a dead PC and extract the data. In a couple instances I simply plopped the hard drive in another PC and fired it up working with little issue.

    • (Score: 2) by CoolHand on Friday July 10 2015, @01:24PM

      by CoolHand (438) on Friday July 10 2015, @01:24PM (#207416) Journal

      I am possibly extraordinarily lucky in this respect, but I have never had a hard drive fail. Motherboards yes, power supplies yes, but I have been able to pull out every hard drive from a dead PC and extract the data. In a couple instances I simply plopped the hard drive in another PC and fired it up working with little issue.

      Yes, you are extraordinarily lucky... Don't count on that. It's just a matter of time..

      --
      Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
    • (Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Saturday July 11 2015, @02:05AM

      by cmn32480 (443) <reversethis-{moc.liamg} {ta} {08423nmc}> on Saturday July 11 2015, @02:05AM (#207737) Journal

      The odds are no longer in you favor.....

      --
      "It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson