[aklug] Wife's hard drive is failing

I have come to realize that hardware today is much much more reliable
than it was just a decade or so ago. I came to this epiphany when my
wife's beloved favorite PC (running Win7, which is her preference)
started "doing odd things". Huh? "Something about AMD RaidX SMART and
I just clicked the X to close it".

Okay, so this tells me that a) her HP desktop computer came
factory-configured with a software RAID for its one and only lonely
750GB disk, and b) the drive is probably going to fail soon.

Thats when I had the epiphany. Used to be that I'd expect a hard drive
to fail every 6-12 months, and when they'd fail they'd just FAIL right
then and there. There would be no question about it, and after much
gnashing of teeth the new drive would be swapped and the OS
reinstalled. It occured to me that a) I hadn't had to do this in a
LOOONG time, and b) my media server's RAID5 is older than her PC and
hasn't had a single problem ever.

If this was my computer (a lappy) needing a drive, the work would be
so boring as to not elicit any comment. I'd just give it the
transplant, install the OS from a handy Ubuntu thumb drive, install
some apps, and then leech all my backup data off the server and from
dropbox. Problem solved. But I've come to that because I'm always
fiddling with another linux flavor.

I don't think I can apply that logic to her Windows box, because I'm
not certain that I can find all of the license codes for her
commercial software packages and I really don't want to buy them all
over again OR reopen the can of worms about how LibreOffice is "just
as good" as MS Office. I stopped trying to fight that fight with her.

Here's my plans. Shoot holes in them, feel free to suggest alternates:
Plan A: Maybe this box's RAID thing works spiffy. Won't know till I
try it. Slap in the new drive, let it get mirrored automagically, and
then after waiting the HOURS AND HOURS that it will take to mirror
350gb of data my wife should be back online with nothing but a cable
swap and a reboot.
Plan B: The box's RAID thing is worthless. AMD RaidX? Bah humbug! I'll
just use good old fashioned 'dd' to do the work. Boot a linux stick,
drop to command line, and dd it over. Everything should be that
simple.

If I dd it, what do I have to do to make the new drive bootable and
make sure that Win7 doesn't throw some juvenile hissy-fit about being
relocated? Don't I have to worry about drive geometry when I use dd to
mirror a partition like this?

Plan C: new drive, linux install, Wine & Virtualbox.

Trying to figure out just EXACTLY what it is that everyone uses on
this computer that depends on Windows, that cannot be done from a
linux host with either Wine or a Windows virtual guest. I'm really
struggling to figure that one out. Kids play Minecraft. Minecraft is
solid on Linux. LibreOffice is great. Facebook games don't care what
OS you're running, as far as I can tell. Kids used to be really into
playing Spore, but I understand that runs fine on Wine.

So I'm probably overthinking this. Hard drive failing? Not a problem:
migrate to linux, and you /were/ doing regular backups to my server?
Right? RIGHT? Yeah, I didn't think so. Cash money says that there is a
ton of schoolwork from the kids saved directly to the hard drive.
Despite my admonitions to always backup, save directly to the server,
or at least just drop your work into the dropbox folder - or do all
three.
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Received on Tue Nov 13 09:32:10 2012