Clone Wars

Being the cheapskate that I am with 2 perfectly good, 8+ year old computers running Windows XP, I was starting to run into a problem. The 20 Gb hard drives on these machines were running out of space... with 5 years of jpegs of the kids, some forays into CD ripping, and the final capitulation and purchase of Microsoft Office Home and Student... (I wish that I had found out about OpenOffice.org sooner... could have saved $150!)...

The solution is to clone the hard drive... make a backup disk image of the hard drive using a program like Acronis TrueImage, save that on an attached external HDD, install the new hard drive in the machine, and then use Acronis to "restore" the image to the larger hard drive. A little bit dicey, because Windows XP can get finicky if it thinks it is being shuffled illegally to new hardware, but this procedure does work. Just let XP reboot an get its bearings again. I successfully completed the process with the basement XP Home machine.

Lurking Linux

I had been coming across more articles (thanks to Google News) about the Linux operating system, its purported advantages in security and stability over the Windows Family, etc... When I went to my college reunion... a top flight school, I ran across a new computer science grad and asked him what they were learning these days and he said, "Linux". That was all I needed to hear to finally spur me on.

A Sign from God

Back on the ranch... I was backing up all of the important files on my XP Pro system in my home office anticipating cloning its hard drive to give the system more breathing room... and then, just as I was about to clone the drive, it stopped working... wouldn't spin, wouldn't boot.

What the hell. I had been listening to Chess Griffin's Linux Reality podcast for a few weeks. I had downloaded and burned some installation CDs for Debian, Ubuntu, fedora and OpenSUSE Linux... time to put Chess's teachings into practice.

I installed the new, blank 60 Gb HDD on the 8 year old machine and I loaded up the Debian Netinstall iso boot CD I had burned. I started up the computer, and "Viola'!". In about 1/5 the time of a typical Windows install, I had desktop Debian Linux installed on this machine. Not long after that, I had the machine talking to my Windows XP and Vista machines, sharing their printers and files over a home, wireless, WPA-secure network.