Re: upgrade a laptop hard drive

On Mon, 29 Jan 2007 11:03:32 -0600, Dances With Crows wrote:

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.

Yes, one nic and one pcmcia wireless card


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#?

Gateway M305CRV


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.

I'm lazy. If there is some simple way to hook the new drive up so I only
have to do one transfer instead of two, I'd prefer that. I understand that
I could easily back up to USB external drive or network to my tower.

.

Relevant Pages

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