Rad wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 11:20pm:

Your OS partition is in the first slot of the partition table.

http://terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=159

That's ideal for what you plan to do. Work from left to right in PM. Otherwise your partition table could be back the front. ie The first physical partition may not be the first primary partition in the partition table.

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Not at all.

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I'm not sure of their reasons. Acronis True Image, ShadowProtect and others allow cloning from the boot CD.

Rad wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2008 at 1:50am:

Same here.

I don't clone (Copy Drive in v2i language) except for tests.

In the last year I've been very keen on the TeraByte products and my test clones are done from BING. I can't claim it's more reliable than other software as I've never had a clone or restore failure with any software.

Rad wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 7:54pm:

Just like Windows - You don't absolutly need it but it's nice to have.  I follow the same general guidelines as Windows for size.  You can also create a swap file in your main partition (similar to a windows page file) but having it on it's own partition is standard practice.

For file system - RiserFS fell out of favor when Hans Riser was charged with his wife's murder.  (He was convicted a few weeks ago.)  Although his personal life has little do do with RiserFS, the thinking seems to be that development on the file system will suffer.

I have a few friends that swear by XFS.  Their benchmarks and experiences have convinced them it is a superior file system.  I still use and recommend ext3.  It is very well tested and proven, so it has been sort of the default for a long time.  I think Ghost can even image and restore it.

I think you're on the right track with Ubuntu.  It has fantastic hardware support, especially for laptops.  It is good for beginners and has a large community, so you can usually find help.

I switched to ArchLinux a while back.  It is optimized for 686 processors (most distros, including Ubuntu, are still compiled to be compatible with 386) and it seems to me to make a noticeable difference in the snappiness of the system.  I still miss Ubuntu sometimes for its ease of use and huge application repository. 

The latest release is an LTS release, which means Canonical (the company responsible for Ubuntu) has committed to support and security updates for that version for at least 3 years.

Rad wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2008 at 2:48pm:

Just google Hans Riser.  It's all over.  Crazy story.

Rad wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2008 at 2:48pm:

Long Term Support

Rad wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2008 at 2:48pm:

Honestly, with 2GB of memory, you'll have to push the computer hard to use swap at all, so you don't need much.  If you are just going to surf and read email in Linux, try going without any swap.  I usually use 1GB and have never been close to running out, so you should be safe with 512 or less.  Like I said, you can always add more later as a regular swapfile on the / partition if you need more.

Rad wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 11:34pm:

Actually, if you want to experiment with current genuine Ghost for doing this migration I'm sure I can arrange that so you can compare. Since you should have enough external USB storage to use both V2i and real Ghost images, you could take images with both and then see how the restore (and partition rearrangement) process works with both.

[ And you can try a "reverse clone" as Brian mentioned, too. ]

Drop me a line at my gmail account if you want to give that a go.

Yeah, that would be cool.  

Getting excited already.

Currently backing-up my non-system drives. Talking waaay long.

Sure, I could go thru and delete a bunch of krap, but that would take even longer .. keep - delete, keep - delete.

Here's the US$64K-question » would back-up (non-system drives) go faster if I used Ghost?

Sure seems like the Ghost back-up goes faster. Maybe it's cuz the destination drive only has to write a few big files .. instead of gazillions of small ones.

Brian, what is the deal with DELETEING the partition prior to restore? I've never done that before and it feels weird.

I am thinking of making partition #2 (ext3, to be used for Linux) .. *also* a primary. Anybody see any problems with that config?

I get four (4) primaries, right? And the extended counts as 1, right?

So I should cool, no?

That would put Linux swap the first partition inside the extended. No problemo? Does the linux swap also like to be  primary? Or maybe same as Linux /root?

Can Linux be installed on a non-primary drive?

The RAM upgrade to 2GB went smoothly. Couldn't have been easier. I am now styling with 2 gigs memory.