[ltp] In search of the perfect laptop combination

[Bret Comstock Waldow]

On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 15:21, Jim Hughes wrote:
>  Hello all,
> 
> I am looking for the perfect laptop combination.

A suggestion.  Whatever you buy, also buy another identical HD and a
carrier to mount it in the bay (most machines have removeable bays these
days).

Backup can be:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=xxxxx

I don't know of a cost effective way to back up a 40G drive except
another 40G drive.  Using this approach also means 2 minutes to
physically swap the drives and you're up and running with your last
backup.

I can safely try updates, upgrades, and distro changes because of this
scheme.

The dd approach copies the bootloader and partition info across.  I
juggle my partitions with PartitionMagic as I slowly tune my system (and
shrink the Window$ partitions).  You can use "cp -au whatever wherever"
for more targeted updates.

I boot on Tom's rootboot disk to do the dd, so the files being copied
are not also being written to by the OS.

When you partition, make /home on it's own partition.  You can update,
upgrade, crash, etc. without damaging your own data, emails, etc.

Cheers,
Bret
-- 
bwaldow at alum.mit.edu