On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 04:45:02PM -0500, Zach wrote: > I have 2 machines: one is a laptop, the other is an old desktop. > Neither has a CD/DVD burner nor do I have broadband internet access > yet however both machines have NIC cards so I thought I could buy a > few feet of CAT5 ethernet cable and connect them to transfer > everything from the laptop to the desktop (which has an extra 50GB > hard disk that is empty and would be perfect for this task). > > The laptop has 2 partitions: /hda1 for Win32 and /hda2 for Linux. > > Both machines are running Debian testing release. The laptop machine > is up to date howver the dekstop has not been updated in 3 years and
I started to respond on how to do this, but -------------^^^^^^^^^ ouch. do you happen to have nfs-kernel-server installed on either of these machines? basically, you need to share one or the other disk across your network so that you can copy files. > > I've never hooked up ethernet or setup a LAN nor transferred a hard > disk image from one machine to another. I want to transfer the Win32 > AND Linux partitions from the laptop over to the desktop extra hard > disk. probably the easiest thing is to get whats called a crossover cable. that allows two nics to be plugged into each other directly. If you think you'll be setting up a lan in the next little while, go ahead and spring for the network switch and a couple regular patch cables -- they'll be more useful in the long run, probably. > > The ethernet cable I just plug into each NIC. Never setup a NIC before > so does someone know how I do this? yup, with a crossover. with a switch or hub, plug each one into a port on the device. > > After that is working what should I do to get the 2 machines talking > to one another. you need to share one of the disks by editing your /etc/exports file man exports restart your kernel server. mount the share onthe other machine. > Also should I copy the data over rather than move it in case there is > a problem? I don't have enough spare space on the laptop side for this > though (only about 200MB free total on the entire disk including Win32 > and Linux partitions). I would recommend that, if you have room, and for ease, just use dd. for example if you have shared hdb1 from the desktop and mounted it on the laptop with mount 192.168.1.1:/path/to/shared/directory /mnt/desktop-disk then do dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/desktop-disk/laptop-drive.img this will give you a bit-for-bit image of the harddrive. This is not useful for much except you could do a bare-metal recovery of the whole drive with it. there are many other options for backing stuff up: tar, cp -a, rsync. do some googling on backups. A
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