Silently seconded. But I guess it's human nature to simply not listen until it turns out that was a wrong choice. And plenty never learn afterwards either.
Anyway, on topic: Most tools allow you to tell the Linux kernel the amount of sectors, heads and cylinders the disk has. It should simply be on the label, and some additional information, such as the use of LBA48, which is the case for most newer disks. If you're too lazy to find a proper backup program etc., put down some more money and buy the new harddisk... twice! Attach them on 2 separate channels (would be appropriate in the case of IDE disks) and you'll have an increased reading speed in the meanwhile. Then use Linux' software RAID capabilities to use partitions on both disks as a RAID1 array. You may have to use expert install for that. If one disk fail in the future, you still have the other one. Using mdadm you can replace the failed one with a new device. Possible partition setup (equal on both disks): Primary #1: Normal Partition, e.g. ext3, mounted as /boot (just feels safe in case of older boot managers that don't support sRAID) Primary #2: Linux swap (Note: swap on both disks means a swap area of DOUBLE the size of this partition, so 512MB-1GB should be great) Primary #3: The rest of the space, mounted as / (will be /dev/md0) -OR- ~20-60GBytes Primary #4: None -OR- the rest of the space, mounted as /home (will be /dev/md1), so you can re-install the OS without touching your own files -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAO8t=by5nezq56y6zmgxy3ijhjyj61prg2+pe6mdoloby5i...@mail.gmail.com
