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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

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

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 10 2015, @02:29AM (#207239) Journal

    I intend to save those applications for use on other Windows OS's -- that's part of the reason for my submitting this 'Ask Soylent' -- for starters, I want to go from XP/SP3 to 7 Pro.

    At first I was going to point out that Thunderbird, Hexchat, and VLC all have Linux versions, and then I reread you point that I was "not going to like the prospect of bringing them over to *nix land" -- that's a different animal all together, and a point well taken. Thanks!

    Taking a disk image was part of the original question. I do an xcopy of my major directory trees each day as backup. Problem is that there's the occasional file that I get 'access denied' or some such error message. And *that* user is an Admin! Hence my request on ideas on how to do a full image backup, that way I *know* I got *everything* brought over.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday July 10 2015, @03:42PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday July 10 2015, @03:42PM (#207492)

    For proper imaging you want a self-booting tool that will bypass the installed OS entirely and and create an exact image of the drive or partition, which will then be bootable when restored, not just a file copy (which won't) . Norton Ghost used to be good, though haven't tried recent versions (and I still remember when Norton Utilities fell off a cliff), and there are several free and open-source alternatives as well, though the name of the one I used last time escapes me.

    Still a quick Google for Norton Ghost alternatives should turn up lots of options.