bjarvis: (Brian's brain)
bjarvis ([personal profile] bjarvis) wrote2008-12-31 05:50 pm
Entry tags:

Disk Upgrades

I've been a busy geek the past few days.

My 100 Mbps network switch has been a little flaky lately so I dashed out to buy a replacement yesterday afternoon. I was surprised to find that gigabit ethernet devices are now so mainstream they're available at Best Buy... it's apparently been a long time since I've indulged myself in geeky shopping. There is now a spiffy 10/100/1000 Mbps switch on my shelf, although I don't have any machines (yet) which can take advantage of the faster speed. Perhaps I'll purchase the gigabit cards for my machines for a birthday present later in January.

The upgrade of my XP box from a 60 & 40 GB hard drive combo to a single 500 GB disk is now complete. Western Digital's boot partition cloning was a breeze to use; I was ready to employ a number of other methods but thought I'd give WD's apps a try first. Restoration of the photo & movie directories will take a while but they'll complete on their own in another couple of hours.

The 320 GB disk for my iMac has arrived. It's going to be more of a challenge since the iMac can only hold one disk at a time and the default file system is HFS+. I'm going to clone the existing 40 GB boot partition to a USB disk and confirm I can indeed boot from the clone. Once so assured, I'll perform the surgery to install the new disk, partition it and restore the clone. If that all goes to hell, I could always plug both disks into my Linux box, repartition the target disk and use "dd" to replicate the data to the new disk. I haven't done this sort of work on a Mac before so it will be a novel & new experience.

I'm really getting to love being unemployed. Do I really have to go back to work on Monday?

[identity profile] abqdan.livejournal.com 2009-01-01 12:46 am (UTC)(link)
Don't get too excited about the Gigabit switch - I upgraded our home network a year ago, but found with the relatively low-end Ethernet cards I bought, I couldn't really sustain even a small percentage of that speed - and my nearly-new network is cabled with Cat5e... My work laptop (with Gigabit) and my Linkstation Gigabit server are the only devices that seem to be able to sustain a reasonable speed. Even so, it's geek-heaven to be gigabit at home!