Saturday's SILUG meeting

["Robert G. (Doc) Savage" <dsavage@peaknet.net>]

For all who missed Saturday's meeting (and there were a LOT of you!),
Steve, Bonnie and I had a fun time. We didn't talk about oVirt, so we'll
have to do that another time.

What we did do is swap out a too-small rotating hard drive in my
ThinkPad uber-laptop with a high performance 256G SSD. Steve used a very
slick technique they often use there in the shop. I pulled the Fedora 17
boot drive (W700s have two drive bays) and booted with a Fedora 17 thumb
drive. Steve then used dd to copy the Master Boot Record, sector 0, from
the Win7 rotating hard drive to the SSD. He then used ntfsclone (from
the ntfsprogs package) to copy over the three NTFS partitions. Even with
a quad-core CPU, 4G of RAM, and a fast SSD, that took a while. Finally,
after installing gparted to his thumb drive, he shuffled the partitions
and grew the main Win7 partition into the unused space. Finally, the old
rotating hard drive came out, the Fedora 17 rotating drive went back in,
and it was time to boot to Win7 on the SDD. There was a long (dramatic?)
pause before it asked if I wanted to boot normally. When I said "Yes" it
promptly rebooted and went thru a full chkdsk cycle. By the time 6pm
rolled around, the ThinkPad was successfully dual-booting to Win7 again
-- much faster. Now, I must remember to do a whole-drive backup on a
regular basis just in case the SDD winks out. When they go, they're
gone.

Next SILUG meeting:  Monday October 1. The Fedora 18 development
schedule has slipped three weeks so far. Maybe we can have an alpha
release to look at.

--Doc


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