[sf-perl] [sfpug] Trustworthy laptop repair?

Fred Moyer fred at redhotpenguin.com
Wed Jan 17 15:45:07 PST 2007


On Wed, 17 Jan 2007, Quinn Weaver wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 03:09:45PM -0800, Fred Moyer wrote:
>> On Wed, 17 Jan 2007, Quinn Weaver wrote:
>> data.  I know of several people who have sent their laptops in for repairs, and
>> as a treat they got a brand new hard drive (with windows installed!).
>
> Yeah, I was planning to do something like this (to IBM's credit, they
> warned me about this possibility).
>
> I suppose if I just dd from the hard drive to a file, and then dd back to the
> new hard drive, it'll work... yes?  Then I won't have to reinstall Ubuntu,
> all its updates, non-free stuff like Flash, my /etc backups, and so on...
>
> Will this approach work?  I plan to do some research on my own,
> but do you know of any caveats?

Only thing I can think of is that there may be bad blocks on your drive as 
a result of the zappage, so the dd may not go as cleanly as expected.  But 
then again, rsync would behave strangely also if the drive has physical 
oddities.  Suggest also rsyncing the contents with checksumming enabled as 
plan b.


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