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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: 2) by martyb on Thursday July 09 2015, @10:14PM
Support wonderful command line operations like: cd $(dirname $(which foo))
I've used DOS since 3.0, and most every windows since Win 3.1 as well as several versions of used OS/2. On the Unix-like side of things, over the years I've had an opportunity towork on SCO, AIX, Solaris, NextStep, RedHat, and others. Since '92 or so, when I was introduced to the MKS Toolkit [wikipedia.org], I've been using Unix-like cmds extensively under Windows. I've later discovered other ports of Unix cmds like GnuWin32 and EZWinPorts which I've made a part of my normal work environment. As far as they go, they're great, but it gets really wonky when trying to nest commands in a pipeline and being unable shield some things from expansion. Single and double quotes just don't quite work as well under windows as they do on the real thing. Basically, I've been improvising under windows for a very long time and I'm tired of the workarounds and struggles and it's gotten to the point that I am willing to take the plunge and move things over to a real scripting environment (I have professional experience with the cshell and bash, but am open to others.)
I like the separation of OS and data that unix-like OSs provide.
I'd like access to application repositories where I can get most of my tools from one place instead of having to scour the net looking for each and every utility. Yet, if I want to, I still have that luxury, as well.
Thanks for the pointers to backup tools and ddrescue, I'll have to check them out!
As for systemd, I'm a firm believer in the Unix philosophy of making small tools that do one thing, but do it very well. You could very well say that I *think* in pipelines! From my perspective, systemd is trying to take over the entire userland from the bottom up. You want to be an init system? Fine, be an init system. Period. Full stop. The tenacious tentacles that I see systemd extending throughout the OS is anathema to how I do things.
That said, I'm not entirely against it, hence my stating "Based on what I've read, I'd like to stay away from systemd," — I'll go for it if there's a good reason, but if I can reasonably avoid it, then I'd prefer to take that route. Your comment makes sense and will temper what I ultimately decide to do, thanks!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2015, @02:08AM
As for systemd, I'm a firm believer in the Unix philosophy of making small tools that do one thing, but do it very well. You could very well say that I *think* in pipelines! From my perspective, systemd is trying to take over the entire userland from the bottom up. You want to be an init system? Fine, be an init system. Period. Full stop. The tenacious tentacles that I see systemd extending throughout the OS is anathema to how I do things.
That said, I'm not entirely against it, hence my stating "Based on what I've read, I'd like to stay away from systemd," — I'll go for it if there's a good reason, but if I can reasonably avoid it, then I'd prefer to take that route. Your comment makes sense and will temper what I ultimately decide to do, thanks!
This is entirely too reasonable sounding. You are either with us or against us. Period. Full stop.