On October 9, 2005 02:45 pm, Dan Martin wrote this amazing epistle:
I have a 200 GB IDE drive in a USB box. The
old machine sees it
perfectly under Windows (and presumably under Linux). I am pretty sure
that I cannot boot from it, so I got 2 WD 120GB internal drives that I
am having some adventures with.
Booting depends on the BIOS. It'll have to be a newer one. For storage I find
it great. If speed isn't essential it's a decent alternative. It doesn't
involve taking the machine apart and the power source is external.
The USB will come in very handy, however. When I get the hang of the dd
command and make sure that I'm not using it in such a way that I trash
my systems, I will use it to ghost a copy of my laptop harddrive to a
file on the USB HD.
Never used dd much. I got it to work half the time (my fault it didn't work
the other half). If your laptop drive is only used for data (ie. you don't
care about the image booting or you'd prefer a fresh OS each time) you can
just use the cp command.
That's the trick - keeping the OS, software, etc. For data, I copy to
USB all the time. But I have no way of booting if something happens to
the hard drive - hopefully by having a ghost of it I can pop in a new
drive if it fails, and restore from the ghost via USB.