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

[John D.]

On Saturday 19 May 2007 08:55, Desmond Armstrong wrote:
> 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.
Thanks for the reply Desmond.

All the other stuff I've tried thus far, hasn't been a complete failure.

My efforts of a complete copy of the old hard drive with Gparted seem to have 
worked - sort of.

So far, I posted the earlier message and then got impatient. So I went ahead 
and "bunged" a Sidux Live CD in. Apart from working out what I needed to do 
to get it installed (I had to keep using Gparted to format my /boot partition 
otherwise the system refused to do anything and gave me an error to do with 
not finding "initramfs" or something like that).

This has meant that at the moment I've managed to get it installed with a GUI, 
so I can look into further configuration/updates etc.

I don't follow what you referred to with the "chown" stuff - I'm gonna find 
out what happens presently as I added my user account during the install but 
I've just added my partners user details with the kusermanager app.

Ha! the IDE to USB converter sounds like and excellent idea though (is it just 
a plug for USB? Does it need seperate power connectors or does it power the 
IDE hdd from the USB socket ??). Might have to look for one of those at the 
next BCF.

I'm just about to run the updating script for the distro so I'll probably post 
back later.

regards

John D.