[GLLUG] Preparing an Old Laptop

[Thomas Hruska]

Charles Tower wrote:
> I just bought an old WinBookXL (PII, 64MB RAM) that might be difficult 
> to get running with a modern Linux, but it was cheap.  I would like to 
> back up the 2GB hard disk and it's Win2000Pro and MS Office 
> installation, so that, if I decide to resell the laptop I can offer it 
> just as it is now.  The drive is a little over half full.  It has a 
> CD-ROM, not a burner; it has a floppy drive, but I'd hate to back up 
> using that.  I hope to use a 512MB flash drive to transfer the backup to 
> another hard disk for safekeeping, but I do have a serial cable I could 
> use with DirectConnect or whatever they call that LapLink wannabe.  Do 
> any of you know of free tools that would allow me to restore the hard 
> disk to its current condition, able to boot Win2000Pro and run MS 
> Office, after a complete reformatting?  Being able to create back-up 
> files no larger than 500MB would be pretty handy, too.
> 
> Another question I have concerns hard drives for laptops.  Are they 
> standard, so that I could easily get a replacement, and just swap them 
> out rather than back up what I have?
> 
>                                Chick

Can't you just boot a live CD Linux distro. up on the machine using its
CD-ROM drive?  Then connect over the network (assuming it has a network
card) then dd the drive and pipe it through gzip and redirect the output
to a remote Linux host over the network.

So something like this:

mount remote_server_name_or_ip:/somedir /mnt
dd if=/dev/hda | gzip > /mnt/WinBookXL.img.gz

The first command should be the target machine.  The second command
dumps the raw drive data out to gzip which compresses the data and dumps
it out across the network onto the target machine.  Since it is a
byte-for-byte binary copy of the drive, it is a matter of reversing the
process to restore the drive.

I picked up this trick from somewhere a long time ago.  It works fairly
well if you aren't using professional tools like DriveImage or Ghost.
And it is free.

-- 
Thomas Hruska
CubicleSoft President
Ph: 517-803-4197

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