[ale] Fwd: Dell Continues Shipping Fresh Linux Laptops

[Preston]

On 2/3/2015 8:23 AM, DJ-Pfulio wrote:
> On 02/03/2015 08:40 AM, Paul Cartwright wrote:
>> On 02/03/2015 01:09 AM, Steve Nicholas wrote:
>>> OK, I had a Toshiba Satellite  that died an untimely death after 13
>>> months.  Bought a Dell Inspiron 15 5000 series.  The 1GB is pegged
>>> with the OS and recovery partitions.  Have several external HDs and
>>> hopefully all of the backup stuff I need.  On the Toshiba, I had  a
>>> Fedora system running.  What I'd like to is put it on an external disk
>>> with the boot partition on hda1.  Anyone done this? I'm up for a
>>> repartition on the fly using win8. Just a bit nervous about blowing
>>> the Dell recover partition off. Thoughts, suggestions....
>> not sure exactly what you are asking... I have 2 working Dell laptops, 1
>> a very old XPS M-140 from 2005, still dual-booting linux / Windows XP.
>> Once you install grub & linux, you lose the capability of restoring
>> windows, so you either need a windows boot CD, or make an image of the
>> disk before you mess with it. In linux, when you connect an external
>> drive, it mounts it. if you look in /dev/disk/by-uuid ( ls-l
>> /dev/disk/by-uuid) you can see the new drive & UUID. Yo can put that in
>> /etc/fstab if you want to boot it..
> fsarchive - backup every partition you might want. It is more flexible at
> restore than any other option. You can restore to a smaller partition, assuming
> it has room for the data.
>
> IF you need to boot stuff saved, use something like clonezilla or partimage, to
> create complete-disk backups.
>

huge fan of fsarchive.

also, before I install linux nowadays on someone's machine I use
ddrescue to make a clone. you can use dd, but most machines i deal with
have a higher chance of bad sectors so i just use ddrescue. clonezilla
(with -rescue option under advanced if necessary) is also a good way of
getting either all the drive or certain partitions backed up.

Preston

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