N8YX
02-28-2011, 07:37 AM
...are Clonezilla (thanks to Luke for the tip) and Qparted.
Had the OS drive (a 10GB unit) in one of the systems start making the "clunk of death" over the weekend, and I had a larger capacity drive hanging around doing nothing. Booted that machine up with Clonezilla and the two drives connected - and in an hour or so the new drive was ready to go.
Except that it was still 10GB in size. Windows' 'diskpart' utility wouldn't resize the primary partition to use all the available space.
Enter Gparted. Booted it up and figured out how to use the drive tools, then resized the primary...let Windows run its file-system checks on the way up - and all is well. :yes:
There's an old Windows 98 box in the shack - it has the only ISA slots in the house. And my PROM programmer's interface is ISA, so this system must be kept "alive". Gparted booted up on that old hardware - a PIII-700/Tyan motherboard with 384MB RAM - and imaged the entire drive across my LAN to a NAS which is attached to one of the routers. The system is firewalled off the 'Net but can talk to the LAN, and it still has its uses from time to time. Thus, a backup is a good thing to have - one is simply not going to rebuild this setup from scratch.
There's more.
I did something very stupid to 'DSG's workstation on Saturday evening and effectively wiped out the C: drive. Of course, this necessitated a full reinstallation of the OS, all the applications -and- the Ubuntu 10.10 setup which I have parked on the other "half" of the workstation's drive. After getting everything fixed up just right, I booted Gparted and imaged her system to another NAS..."just in case". ;)
These tools are neat. I encourage everyone to try them, and to donate - time or money - to the projects which maintain them.
Well done, ladies and gents.
Had the OS drive (a 10GB unit) in one of the systems start making the "clunk of death" over the weekend, and I had a larger capacity drive hanging around doing nothing. Booted that machine up with Clonezilla and the two drives connected - and in an hour or so the new drive was ready to go.
Except that it was still 10GB in size. Windows' 'diskpart' utility wouldn't resize the primary partition to use all the available space.
Enter Gparted. Booted it up and figured out how to use the drive tools, then resized the primary...let Windows run its file-system checks on the way up - and all is well. :yes:
There's an old Windows 98 box in the shack - it has the only ISA slots in the house. And my PROM programmer's interface is ISA, so this system must be kept "alive". Gparted booted up on that old hardware - a PIII-700/Tyan motherboard with 384MB RAM - and imaged the entire drive across my LAN to a NAS which is attached to one of the routers. The system is firewalled off the 'Net but can talk to the LAN, and it still has its uses from time to time. Thus, a backup is a good thing to have - one is simply not going to rebuild this setup from scratch.
There's more.
I did something very stupid to 'DSG's workstation on Saturday evening and effectively wiped out the C: drive. Of course, this necessitated a full reinstallation of the OS, all the applications -and- the Ubuntu 10.10 setup which I have parked on the other "half" of the workstation's drive. After getting everything fixed up just right, I booted Gparted and imaged her system to another NAS..."just in case". ;)
These tools are neat. I encourage everyone to try them, and to donate - time or money - to the projects which maintain them.
Well done, ladies and gents.