looking for linux experts, part 2

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 05:48:14PM -0500, ted leslie wrote:
> its a laptop,
> 250GB for 100$ with enclosure and usb interface?
> you have a good hardware supplier! :)

About $100.  And no I assumed it was a real computer.  #123 is about
$100.

> if your HD crunches more as its used, dd the whole thing would be really bad,
> especially if it generates 10,000 kernel "disk" messages a minute.
> if you do decide to dd ... i'd try a dry run with say 10 MB
> before you get your HD nice and toasty warm.

If you want all the data, it is probably still the fastest way since it
avoids trying to deal with the filesystems error handling.  I have done
it before, and had great success with it.  Sometimes you can't run fsck
due to the hardware errors, and hence can't even mount the filesystem to
get the data off.  After the dd, you can run fsck since it can now fix
the broken sectors (since they are writable on the new disk) and you can
eventually mount the filesystem after fixing it enough.

> you can even get a USB flash from a local radio shack, camera shop, even a drug store, and probably even 
> a book store, etc, 
> so it might be a bit easy and quicker to obtain.

USB 3.5" enclosure: $26
250G drive: $123
160G drive: $93
80G drive: $64

So you could get an 80G with USB2.0 enclosure for under $100.  With a
250G if would be closer to $150.  But it is way bigger and probably
faster than any flash device you can get.  It is also physically bigger
and not quite as conviniently portable. :)  It depends how much data you
are trying to move.  If course if the machine is actually a laptop, it
might make sense to get a 2.5" enclosure and a new laptop drive, then
copy everything over to the new drive to a partition made at the end of
the drive, then move the new drive into the laptop and use it to
reinstall the system to.

Lennart Sorensen
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