Copying…still copying…still copying…still copying…

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Richard D. James is the Production Designer on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I wonder if he is any relation to the Richard D. James also known as Aphex Twin?

Today was all about hard disk house-cleaning. It started with a quick trip to PC-Club for a cheap, yet big hard drive. Next was a quick detour to the supermarket for some snacks. The whole time was in the convertible, with the top down, listing to a mix of happy Eels music. Next was a stop at Diedrich's to snack on the sushi from Ralph's and to get an iced coffee. I am not sure exactly what I received. It was not iced coffee and it was not iced tea. It was something…else–a mutant hybrid of the two, probably from a sloppy employee.

A couple of days ago, I picked up the latest Partition Magic (which is supposed to handle Linux ext3 partitions) and the latest version of Ext2fs Anywhere from Paragon. I have not yet tried Partition Magic, but the Ext2FS Anywhere program is supposed to let you mount Ext2 and Ext3 filesystems from Windows. According to my laptop, these are all LIES! It can see the partition and assign a drive letter, but as soon as I click to it: “This volume appears unformatted. Would you like to format it now?” NO!!!!

I have been running ext3 for quite a while on my laptop and needed to upgrade a loud, clicking hard drive on the Netninja.com machine, so I thought “why not just make it ext3?” It was simple enough to install and format, but no mountey-mount. This is a minimal stock Debian Potato-come-Woody machine, and the kernel was still a 2.2 series. apt'ing a new kernel (complete with LILO and modules), might I say, is a very stressful experience. “Is this going to work? Will it reboot after I'm done? Will it load the ethernet modules?” Needless to say, I had a boot floopy and the kernel source on CD handy. I am usually a roll-you-own kernel man myself, but am trying to keep Netninja a completely stock off-the-shelf system in case I need to do a quick rebuild and/or restore-from-/backup.

Currently, everything seems fine. The new hard drive is twice as big as the old one. It partitioned and formatted fine. The new kernel and modules seem fine. Data is copying from the clickey-click hard drive to the new one. And if that one fails, there is an image rsync'ed on a computer across the house (with a 10-base-T bottleneck in the way, unfortunately). The only thing that can go wrong now would be if the house burned down. (If you do not see a post from me in the immediate future, you will know that I just jinxed myself.)

Posted in: Dear Diary

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