[aklug] Re: Wife's hard drive is failing

Plan A is most likely your best bet, if it will work. I haven't done a
migration like plan B on anything newer than XP, but on XP you run "format
/MBR d:" (where d: is your new drive." to get the windows master boot
record setup. Plan C is laudable, but honestly in my experience getting
things to run under wine isn't a plan, but a hobby.

James Gibson
On Nov 13, 2012 1:32 PM, "David Prentice" <ak.prentice@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 11:54:33 2012