Hi all,
Sorry to go on at length about my personal experience. I expect to be able to use this thread to ask questions as I go, plus I feel like elaborating. You've been warned. If you'd just like to be helpful without going through a fuller context, you can skip down to the highlighted question below.
In September last year I installed Sarge (was testing but unofficially stable) on my PC on hdb. The installation was a success, and although there certainly were issues and a couple of frustrations, I had fun installing; fun, because I learned a lot of stuff as I went. This actually is a large part of what I like about *nix systems.
Unfortunately, the large part of my home computer use is for games and surfing, as well as occasional document work. At work I don't really have much of a choice; it's either WinXP or leave my office and sit at a UNIX terminal in the student lab. (That's not strictly true: I installed Debian by CD on a machine in my office, but I'm not allowed to connect it to the network... I have to transfer everything by USB stick, it's kind of like a car without wheels.) It seems that I never get very far past installing and configuring Linux.
I should get to the point. Last week I decided to learn Emacs and installed it on my PC. In the process I realized I kind of miss Debian, so I decided to get it running again. Not that it was missing or broken, but this year I transferred my Windows drive (I have my Windows partitions on a separate drive) to a new larger drive, and left the other drives disconnected. I also decided to let Windows take over the MBR, because GRUB was having trouble chain-loading XP; I think it's not on a primary partition or something. This left me with hdb now connected but a powerless bootloader. No problem, of course, I'll just use the GRUB bootable floppy I made.
The floppy, last used in January, is dead. Neither Windows nor Knoppix could read from it. So I tried rescue booting from the Debian CD, but the copy I had on hand was Woody 3.0r2, and I have Sarge installed, so it didn't work. I have the Sarge CDs here at work and will take them home and try again tonight to rescue boot, then write a new GRUB boot floppy. (Question comes below)
I would like to continue to use the NT bootloader and add an entry for Debian that can be loaded from by the NT bootloader. I did this with LILO when I had SuSE installed, and will try it with GRUB (for example,
here.)
Question 1: Since I haven't really used or upgraded Debian since the end of 2004, I want to upgrade to the stable version of Sarge. I am burning a DVD today, which I can use both to install a new distribution or, hopefully, in place of Internet access for upgrading. The question is , if I have further trouble rescuing (i.e., booting) the current Debian installation (Sarge 3.1r2, I believe) -- I spent an hour or so last night trying, without knowing how to do it properly via Knoppix -- might it just be easier to reinstall Debian from scratch than pulling my hair out over a rescue operation? There isn't any work or valuable data on the Linux partition, just a working, configured installation that needs to be upgraded anyway.
Question 2:Now that I've decided that I can safely scrap my old Windows partitions on the original 80GB drive, I will eventually want to transfer my Linux paritions (currently on a 40GB drive) to that 80GB drive. How difficult might this prove to be? If transferring Linux partitions to a new drive turns out to be difficult (I don't own Norton Ghost), this would speak for just doing a fresh install on the 80GB drive now with the new Sarge, costing me the install procedure at the cost of rescuing and upgrading the current installation and transferring it later.
I realize there is some speculation involved here; I'm just asking for feedback and thoughts. I know it's designed to be easy to upgrade with Debian, but I've never actually done it, and I have no idea about transferring Linux partitions between drives. I did it with the Windows partitions -- not without difficulty -- using the Maxtor utility. It writes bit for bit, so I assume it can handle any file system, but I'm not too confident about it. Then again, maybe I should do these things just to have the experience.