[Sussex] failing hard drive - how do I boot the replacement ?

[Desmond Armstrong]

For me the best way is to set up a new system and then copy the old 
/home partition.

I normally do this procedure as root but you must remember to change the 
owner 'chown -R <user>  <user>' in a terminal, as root.

The procedure is:-

Set up new system and generate the necessary user profiles, user1, 
user2, guest.

Now with it all running and logged in as priviledged user copy the 
individual user profiles across into the /home area, (overwriting the 
existing). You actually need the various visible folders like Documents 
Photos etc but you also need things like .thunderbird and .mozilla for 
the email and browser bookmarks.

And then as root cd to /home and in terminal as root apply 'chown -R 
user1 user1' for each user.

I use one of those IDE to USB adaptors for reading the old disk about £7 
from the computer fair for transferring the data.
Such an adaptor is veru useful as a failing HD will sometimes work in 
one position better than another, I have certainly had some 
conosiderable successes by this method. It also allows you to minimize 
the time for which the old disk is connected.