that the new bits I've fitted to my system are working ok ?

A brief precis to the saga:

just over a fortnight ago, my hard drive started making horrible noises (well thats where the noise seemed to be coming from).

So in a panic, I tried to use the tar command to make a compressed copy of my /home (2 user accounts, mine and my partner).

Part of the way through, the system seemed to come to a grinding halt.

I managed to pillage my external driver for a replacement HDD. During my meddling the original hdd actually seemed to be working properly, so I used gparted to copy the old hard drive/partitions/data etc etc, to the new.

It didn't want to boot (the new drive that is), I looked up the dd command and tried that. It still didn't want to boot. In the end, I just did a re-install of the OS, but only installed to the /boot and /, but didn't touch the /home.

I also noticed that my CDRW was starting to play up (the DVDRW was fine).

Great. So today, I went to the local branch of PC World to buy another Hard drive (unfortunately they didn't have another 320gb in stock so I made do with a 250gb - a Hitachi OEM model), another DVDRW (why not, 2 are better than one plus the both DVDRW will burn CD's) and a tube of CPU heat sync compound (during all the drive swapping I found that my CPU was stuck fast to the heat sync and the heat sync gets in the way of pulling drives in and out).

So now I've installed all three items and now just need to know if theres anything else I should do to confirm that they're working correctly and that I can access them.

The new DVDRW has just been used to fire up Gparted so that it's formatted as ext3 so I think it's probably working - I can't think of any other way of checking it, other than burning something to disc - I've not got anything that needs burning just now so ........?????

I'll only know if the heat sync compound is not doing its thing if I manage to over drive the cpu enough to cook it! - I'm guessing it'd shut down before that.

The new hard drive is showing on my desktop as "250 gb media", with the "unmounted" icon (no little green triangle to show it's mounted). So do I need to have an entry in the fstab for it ??? and is there anything else I'd need to do to make sure it can be access by both root and the user accounts?

TVM in advance

regards

John

p.s. Oh and yes, I was "thinking security" before fitting the new hard drive. I unplugged the newer, working one, and then with the older failing one plugged in, fired up the system with "Dariks Boot and Nuke" - it took four and a half hours to do 3 passes of the drive (a 120 gig WD).

Well as far as I can guess, the two new bits of hard ware are working.

I've not only booted gparted with the new DVDRW, I've had it playing a cd. Excellent.

The new hard drive, well I think I've managed to add it to the fstab successfully and managed to get the system so that I can copy stuff to it.

All I need to know now is how to make backups to it. Not really the whole /home, but just the data files in both the user accounts.

So can anyone tell me how I go about doing that ???

regards

John

New HD is mounted so you can cd to it and run a tar or cp or dd (no experience with the last one).

Or do I misunderstand the question.

Hum? Yes that'd make sense Wim, I suppose I'd have to learn how to find out just how much data (music etc) there is to copy - plus the exact name of the various files that I'd need to copy.

Ha! just when all this linux stuff is starting to make a bit on sense (6 or so years down the line) then I find, yet something else that I know "bog all" about!

Ah well, I suppose thats life with the penguin!