the corner office

I had to deal with a hard drive going clackety-clack bzzzz this week. Unlike the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2004, this event shall be known as the Lesser Spotted Hard Drive Fizzle of 2005. I learned my lesson last year, and it paid off now.

The drive in question was a 5 year old 20 gig hard drive, so it was hardly unexpected. I used this old drive for my Gentoo and Windows installations, and kept all my 'real' data on a 200GB data drive. I regularly rsynced my entire Gentoo operating system onto the 200 gig drive as well, and then backed all of that up to another external USB 200 gig drive, which spends most of its time hidden away in the back of a cupboard, where burglars and lightning are less likely to get to it.

So thankfully, all I needed to do this time around was boot up with a Linux liveCD, convert an unused FAT32 partition into a boot, swap and root partition on the 200 gig drive, copy across my entire Gentoo system, set up the bootloader on the new drive, and I was back up and running.

What I didn't even try to restore, because I hadn't had much joy with it in the past, was my Windows system. I've now moved from dual-boot-but-never-touch-Windows, to being 100% Windows-free. When I finally get around to investing in a new PC I'll probably set it up as a dual-boot, but right now, being Linux-only will do me just fine.