Just replaced my 160GB hard disk with another of the same size, a Western Digital 7200RPM drive with 8MB cache as the original drive was about to fail. I copied the whole Linux directory structure across to the new drive, using Midnight Commander: /usr, /lib, /sbin & friends as well as the /boot directory and everything else replacing the files in a fresh Linux Mint installation on the new hard drive and essentially replaced the whole fresh installation with all of the files and folders from my old installation, just copying it all across as root, as Midnight Commander can copy everything preserving the attributes, so that is what I did and I am running Linux off that new hard disk with my old Linux installation moved to a new drive it works perfectly! Too easy. Now I have more space to use.
Logged in since Tue May 25 08:38 (EST) on tty1 43 minutes 3 seconds idle makron@deusexmachina-matrix [~]$ df -Hla Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on tmpfs 525M 0 525M 0% /lib/init/rw proc 0 0 0 - /proc sysfs 0 0 0 - /sys varrun 525M 226k 525M 1% /var/run varlock 525M 0 525M 0% /var/lock udev 525M 189k 525M 1% /dev tmpfs 525M 0 525M 0% /dev/shm devpts 0 0 0 - /dev/pts rootfs 155G 27G 121G 18% / fusectl 0 0 0 - /sys/fs/fuse/connections binfmt_misc 0 0 0 - /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc gvfs-fuse-daemon 0 0 0 - /home/makron/.gvfs makron@deusexmachina-matrix [~]$ |
121 Gigabytes is plenty of space for more applications to be installed and room for more kernels to be built as well.
I have installed another 40GB hard disk with just one EXT4 partition to store music and a couple of movies that I have backed up anyway, so it does not matter if it fails, it is not the Operating System. I am wanting to get into a University IT course and I need a working computer, and running Linux is the best way to have that versus running Windows XP or Windows 7. I have a Windows XP hard drive I could put in and run, but I will stick with Linux Mint 7 for now. The Fedora Core 12 distro does not seem to work properly with the Nvidia drivers you download from the Nvidia website. They have implemented a nouveau driver instead which has an experimental 3D driver you can install from the repository. But I would rather use the stable Nvidia drivers as they are reliable and perfect for running games like Darkplaces Quake and prboom+ GL. But it would be good to have Open Source OpenGL drivers for ATI and Nvidia cards, instead of installing the closed Nvidia drivers to get 3D graphics acceleration for gaming and 3D graphics work, like with Blender. Then Fedora and Ubuntu could ship the drivers with the distro and it would be setup and working without having to download the drivers every time you want to use Compiz. That would be the best outcome we could get. Open Source drivers for hardware is the way to go and the best thing for the Open Source community. Sure I like to listen to mp3 music and use Nvida drivers and some closed software like Opera, but I like my Open Source software as well.