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By Johnny, September 23, 2007 5:46 pm

I got my Seagate 160GB laptop hard drive on Friday in the mail. Needless to say I was looking forward to bump my storage needs from a maxed out 25GB factory drive. I bought the drive refurbished from Computer Geeks online. It cost me about $100 which was alot cheaper than many of newer drives out there even in eBay. What began as a task that I was looking forward to in the week, finally ended now at Sunday evening. Copying a hard drive may seem to be a trivial task, since many people would just reformat and reinstall the operating system and all your software. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to retain the same exact settings from my previous hard drive and did not want to go through reinstalling. I hate starting over when I don’t have to.

Back when I first worked as a System Administrator, I use to configure and build out similar laptops by first installing and setup 1 laptop with the exact software and settings required. I would then use, at the time, Norton Ghost to image the entire hard drive and saved the image on a server somewhere on our network and then use that image to duplicate on laptops with the same hardware. It was the coolest thing back then and would save alot of time versus setting up and installing manually. I did a quick Google search for “free hard drive cloning” which yielded several references to 2 free Linux-based solutions: Gparted and Partimage. They were both part of a live CD called SystemRescueCD. You use Gparted to setup your new hard drive’s partition and use Partimage to clone and restore a partition.

I could go through the excruciating tasks I had to endure but I’ll save that pain and give you a brief summary of what worked for me.

1. Cloned all three of my partitions from my smaller hard drive to my Linux file server. I did this by booting up the live CD and issuing the following commands:

   mkdir /mnt/samba

   mount -t smbfs -o username:johnny //192.168.0.xxx/johnny /mnt/samba

   partimage -z1 /dev/hda1 /mnt/samba/location/to/image/folder/clonefilename.gz

   I had to turn on DHCP on the rescuecd start-up prompt by executing the command rescuecd dodhcp

2. Physically installed my new hard drive.
3. Executed the following command at the start-up prompt:
   rescuecd dodhcp dostartx This started the X-Windows with a valid network connection.
4. I then used Gparted to partition all my partitions exactly the same as my previous hard drive. This step is important since I actually jumped the gun and partitioned the main boot drive to fill-up the disc’s maximum capacity. This rendered the partition unreadable from Windows XP. It only saw the original 25GB and not the 140GB. I also turned on the “boot” flag for the main partition that had Windows XP and turned the “hidden” flag on the other 2 partitions that wasn’t there in my original drive.
5. I then started the x-term window and executed the command: partimage restore /dev/hda1 /mnt/samba/location/to/image/folder/clonefilename.gz.000. I did this for each 3 partitions.
6. After all my data was restored, I rebooted the system into Windows XP.
7. Windows XP sees the new drive and ask to reboot the system once again after it automatically installed the drive.
8. I reboot again into SystemRescueCD and ran the previous command to start X-windows and DHCP.
9. I opened up Gparted and chose to resize my partition from 25GB to the remaining unallocated disk space.
10. I rebooted to XP again.
11. XP automatically jumped into CHKDSK mode and revalidated the hard drive space.
12. XP then boots into the operating system and finds the new hard drive. I then asked for me to reboot my system once again. I obliged.
13. Voila! My new C: drive is now 140GB.

I probably left out alot of details but the general idea is captured here. I tried so many ways of setting this up which included an attempt to use 1 large partition, setting up a larger partition for the boot partition, etc. All this did was give me blank screens with a flashing prompt. I was never able to boot-up using the other methods. But when I finally followed the steps above, I was successful.

Just a bit of a warning. I’ve been using Linux for over 8 years now so I know my way around the operating system. Doing this requires alot of patience. Hopefully I did most of the grunt work for those who stumble upon this post to use.

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 8600. The other 2 partitions are backup crap that Dell installs with every new laptop. I tried so hard to not include them in my new hard drive. Unfortunately, I was not able to do that. C’est la vie.

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By Johnny, July 18, 2007 12:27 am

This was mentioned on Diggnation Episode 105. Absolutely insane anime drawing using only html coding. Web developers will appreciate this incredibly complex and amazing use of html to create this page.

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By Johnny, June 17, 2007 8:43 pm

I was listening to TWIT’s 100th episode this weekend and they had mentioned Drobo. Drobo is a new USB hard drive which uses a much more intelligent way of protecting your data. They claim that it is a robot that manages the best use of your hard drive. It will shrink and expand your disk space as soon as you add or remove a drive from your array. It is also not picky of the size and brand of hard drives that gets inserted into the disk array. Just as long as it is 3.5″ drive with SATA interface.

This got me excited since my Raid-1 Linux server at home is close to 60% of capacity. This is only a 200GB file server. I figure I should be in the market for this or similarily a NAS device like Infrant’s ReadyNAS NV+. I stumbled upon an entry in the blogosphere from isnoop.net which briefly goes over the differences of each devices. One of the things I wish the Drobo would have is NAS capability so I can just plug this into my network and give access to multiple systems much like my Linux file server. The negative for ReadyNAS is that it won’t use all the available disk space if you had put in bigger disks. It would just use the least common denominator and default to the smallest disk size. Both negativity are critical in my opinion and I have decided that I will wait later to consider a new storage solution. I also read on drobospace.com that you can use an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station to attach the Drobo and have it serve like a file server. That wouldn’t work since I just got a new wireless access point.

What I have to consider is that if I replace my Linux server, I wouldn’t have the ability to offset any other features my Linux box gave me like bittorrent downloading. Yup, I even looked to see if the Drobo was Linux compatible. It is possible but not built in natively. Hopefully the NAS version of Drobo is coming out sometime soon. *Crossing my fingers*

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By Johnny, January 31, 2007 11:38 am

I was listening to the latest TWIT podcast and they had mentioned a pretty cool application. It is the Zarate Labs Password Generator. This thing is a bookmarklet which resides on your browser to help you maintain your passwords. You basically right click on the bookmarklet link and save it as a Favorite or Bookmark (depending on which browser you’re using). When you are adding or updating a website’s password and before you change the password, you would go to that Favorite or Bookmark. This will bring up a pop-up. Just enter you new password phrase and have that generate the new 7 character password.

So what’s so great about this application? This basically allows you to create a new “hardened” password based off of a simple word. This will allow you to use a public machine without any worries of people knowing what the real password is (just remember to delete the bookmarklet when you’re done). You can change your password as much as possible. Hackers won’t be able to run a program against a dictionary if you have a password that contains words. It works on both Macs and PCs. I even added this to my links page.

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By Johnny, October 25, 2005 7:32 pm

If you’re seeing this post, you’re on my new server. Welcome! I just moved over from my old host to this one. That’s why I haven’t been posting as frequently as I wanted to. Thank you Techsoluxions for providing hosting. This move will allow me to separate my “business” from my “play” and allow me to post pictures liberally. At least I know how to migrate so if I need to move, I can do it without hesitation.

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By Johnny, October 21, 2005 1:37 am

Which File Extension are You?

Saw this on other people’s blogs so I thought I give it a try. Great I’m a boring PowerPoint presentation.