h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"External HDD, which is better, enclosure with internal or readymade."

There's only one way to find out - FIGHT!!!

(Sorry, just off to watch Harry Hill. )

If you have an old internal drive you want to reuse you can get an enclosure for under £10 - just make sure you get the right type. (i.e. is the drive IDE or SATA?)

As for making a backup image, I'm told "Norton Ghost" is very good. I'm completely Windows-free now so I'm not really following what's available.

Got a second hand IBM 40GB 7200 DECSTAR for £6.50, my brother had my old pc. Now I'm looking for an enclosure, less than £10 any ideas. Ebay have got some but I don't know if they will be ok.

Then I want a very tiny operating system so that I can start off the ext disc containing an image and program to restore the image.

Any ideas how to do this.

Forgot, when I've got that working I can start to think about partitioning C: and installing Ubuntu, for which I've got a disc I think.

This is an easy question for you: I've decided to install Ubuntu on the xternal disc when I get it, so how do I ensure it chooses the eternal disc because options are 1) CD 2) ext 3) internal 4)Flash.

But that referes to the primary device and Ubuntu might just choose C: actually this might be easy and the same as installing in a different partition.

No! not easy. You have to use netbootin and I'm going to install Dam small linux, now I need something to make a copy of my harddrive leaving out text files images ect.

"Now I'm looking for an enclosure, less than £10 any ideas."

The ones I was thinking of (just under £9) have sold out, I'm afraid. Next-best I can find are these "IcyBox" units that have been opened - just under £17 each, 2 available at the time of posting...

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=543L

"Then I want a very tiny operating system so that I can start off the ext disc containing an image and program to restore the image.

Any ideas how to do this."

I'd look for some sort of small Linux-based disk imaging package and a version of Linux that'd run from a memory stick with it. Google is your friend.

I got a Tsunami classic 3.5" for £7.50 new in Ebay. Don't know what they normally cost.

The postage £6.50 but it looks better than one in Amazon.

I don't know why I can't just disable the main drive and install DSL linux directly.

I want a free iso create/restore that works on linux, or maybe it won't need an op system.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/g4l/

I've downloaded openSUSE KDE-4. I don't know what I'm doing it's 64 bit, but what about drivers, what happens on dual boot systems with regard to drivers.

Even my cpu has windows drivers, so does my modem, monitor, keyboard mouse everything.

Better do this slowly, but I plan to reserve 60 Gb for SUSE to check out the 64 bit stuff.

*waves at Peet and proceed to butt in*


With luck it should auto-detect everything, try running a live-CD/DVD before you install and see what works (remember as a live-CD runs off your CD/DVD not HD so disk access is a lot slower which will mean that the operating system will feel more clunky than if installed on a HD)


IMHO your biggest problem with SUSE (sorry Peet I know your a fan) will not be Driver support (this is pretty good across most Linux flavours now) but the installation of non-free (in terms of copyright) media codecs such as the files needed to listen to MP3's or watch commercial DVD's in my experiences this was always a pain with SUSE but they have had two years to improve the experience since I last had a play with SUSE.

Thanks, I chose SUSE because it's 64 bit and I saw it had nVidia drivers available. It's a steep learning curve and I have just about everything to proceed.

SUSE make a very polished distribution and it is (IMHO) not a bad choice, every distribution has it's pros & cons. I've been a Debian user on my main system for the last few years (Plus = it's rock solid, has great package management & philosophy that I like - Cons = it's not and never will be the most cutting edge distribution).


As for steep learning curve, with both KDE & Gnome it's 95% like MS Windows (just point & click (if you want something really different once you are feeling comfortable with Linux have a play with a tiling window manager such as Awesome)) only with fewer blue screens - I know all the forums will try and scare you by using the command line to give help but that is because it easier to be more precise in less space that way than trying to describe mouse clicks (I can tell you how to install a package (program pre configured for a distribution) with Debian in one line using the console whereas I would need several paragraphs to describe the same thing using the Graphical User Interface but the fact is I use the GUI to install packages more often than I use the command line).

Yes the command line stuff is a bit off putting having been used to windows; but in the past there was nothing but command line stuff, and I just copy it without any great understanding of what's going on.

*waves back at Happy*

I don't care how hard the proprietary CODECs are to find - I run VLC.

A.LeG., this just popped up on Digg, and might be of interest to you...

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=520

Yes it is. I haven't got a blank CD and dvd doesn't work on bootup so I tried my Flash drive.

Could not find bootable table: So how do you fix it to be bootable?

Received my enclosure and it's great for £7.50 +£6.49 postage.

http://www.tsunami.co.th/3.5%20HDD%20ENCLOSUES/USB%20to%20e%20SATA/tsunami%20--Classic3500(SATA%20to%20eSATA+USB2_0).htm

I tried it with the application you suggested;ImgBurn, but although it reckons it made a bootable image with a MDS file it is just the same.

My cyberlink will only let me write to DVD as DVD not CD on a DVD, so no luck.

What should the emulation type be, I'll try that next.

I got a dvd to work, the cyberlink dvd suite must be doing something to the image because it was .iso bootable but nothing.

ImgBurn will not work for flash drive but I would like to know how to make it work. Probably copying the dvd No I would like a proper way.

How do you Shut SUSE down because I was too frightened to navigate just in case it saved something.

"How do you Shut SUSE down"

su
shutdown - h now












or (just like ms windows) click the red off button you will find on the menu (sorry been a while since I used KDE so I can't be more precise )