Re: upgrade a laptop hard drive

On Mon, 29 Jan 2007 09:30:15 -0700, ray staggered into the Black Sun and
said:
On Mon, 29 Jan 2007 03:40:26 +0000, AZ Nomad wrote:
On Sun, 28 Jan 2007 15:52:56 -0700, ray <ray@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm considering installation of a larger hard drive in my laptop. Can
someone describe the options for cloning a couple of partitions from my
existing drive?

partimage, rsync, cp -a, and so forth. This thing has a NIC, right? I
can't see how a computer without a NIC in this day and age would be
considered useful, but you never said anything.

I'm assuming there is not way to connect both drives to internal
connections - correct?

Depends on the laptop. Does your laptop have a make and model#?

that would certainly be faster than USB copies.

USB2 ~= 20M/sec, reasonably close to many 2.5" 5400 RPM disks.

Keep in mind that a usb2 external case will be so much faster than
the laptop drive that the performance hit won't make any difference.
You're lucky if a laptop drive can do 5MB/s

If you're talking 1997-vintage laptops, sure. A modern laptop's disk
will be much faster than 5M/s.

I [am] not overly concerned with how to transfer the data, what I'm
looking for are suggestions for the physical attachment.

Cat5/6, shirley? Boot laptop from partimage LiveCD, mount large
disk in desktop over NFS/SMB, use partimage to copy junk. Replace 2.5"
disk, boot from partimage LiveCD, fdisk new disk, mount network FS,
restore junk, reinstall GRUB/LILO. Advantage: no extra hardware needed.
Make sure you disable encryption if you can, though, otherwise
backup/restore will take longer.

I was wondering if there might be a laptop Y cable so I could plug in
both drives at once to do the transfers.

See second paragraph. Some manufacturers have Ultrabay-like things that
you can plug a 2.5" disk into. These usually cost more than a 2.5->3.5
adapter.

--
Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Two. One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub
with brightly colored machine tools.
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
.

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