<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 8:12 AM, Ingles, Raymond <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:Raymond.Ingles@compuware.com">Raymond.Ingles@compuware.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
> CLMalmsten<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> I learned yesterday at the mdlug meeting that before making the swap,<br>
I<br>
> should backup the folder C:\Dell. I no longer have my original<br>
> drivers/utilities disk from Dell, and Backup is not an option under<br>
System<br>
> Tools. I'm wondering if I should backup anything besides this C:\Dell<br>
> folder.<br>
<br>
</div> Well, it never hurts to have good backups. Just copying the folder to a<br>
flash drive or DVD should be enough, though, for backing up that folder.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> As a follow up to that question, does it matter whether I swap the<br>
hard<br>
> drives out, or whether I keep the Windows hard drive where it is (in<br>
my<br>
> laptop) and attach the new drive by USB? Any reason I wouldn't want to<br>
do<br>
> that?<br>
<br>
</div> It'll be slower, that's all, if it's attached via USB.<br>
<br>
Another option, depending on how full the drive is, is to shrink the<br>
Windows partition and put Linux on a new partition on the existing<br>
drive.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> and if I did connect the new drive by USB, would I have the option<br>
> at startup to choose which hard drive to use?<br>
<br>
</div> Yeah, that can be done, but it can be a little trickier to set up.<br><div><div class="h5"></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Take a look at trying to get a good image of your current computer. That way you can always go back to it if you need to. You can also mount that image in the future and access files on it of you happened to forget one. Another nice thing about this is that when you buy a larger harddrive in the future you can always just put that image on a partition and be all set up that way. It is also possible to use that image (even on the USB drive) to run as a virtual machine on your new linux machine, meaning that if you happened to need a program that might not be available all you have to do is fire up you 'old' windows machine and be good to go.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Ghost 4 Linux <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l">http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l</a> is nice to do a full on copy of everything on your computer and it can send that image to a local mount (you might need to mount the USB drive before it works) or to a ftp storage device or another computer on the network. It will take a little while, but, for me at least, it is nice to know that you won't actually lose anything, period, because you know you got it all. </div>
</div><br>