Re: Upgrading Harddrive and USB

[Heather <star@starshine.org>]

> Hello folks,
> 
> I have two questions.
> Firstly, I've tried to recompile a newer 2.4-pre kernel, and have had
> minimal success.
> I'm mostly trying to get USB support enabled because my only internet comes
> through a USB ethernet device by D-Link. Unfortunately, my PCMCIA cardbus
> controller completely died out a few months back, and isn't under warranty.
> I've had to resort to my windows partition, which is less than ideal :)
> 
> I seek some ideas because I think there are other ways to get USB support
> but I don't really know.

You can add USB support to 2.2.16 or 2.2.17 sources easily by adding SuSE's
USB-backport:
	http://www.suse.cz/development/usb-backport

...but Alan Cox merged it into the 2.2.18pre tree, so you can get it there
too. 

> Secondly, I'm thinking about buying a new harddrive, maybe 10 gigs. I'd
> rather not go through installation and etc. of debian again, and windows..
> it takes a while as we all know and customization never ends. My idea is to
> transfer the entire filesystem to another computer and burn cds of my stuff
> (current hd only 3 gigs..). Does anybody think this is feasible? Any ideas
> about actually pulling it off .. If i'm using my USB ethernet, which I only
> have in Windows, my linux partition will be inaccessible. I'm not sure how
> to get around that easily.

Assuming your machine boots off of a CD, you could toss a modern Toms'RootBoot
image as the boot portion on the CD, use rtbt to partition your new drive, 
then unpack the tarball, doublecheck your /etc/lilo.conf, chroot into the
new space, re-run /sbin/lilo.  exit the chroot, dismount the CD, eject it,
and reboot.

My own little beastie is due back from the shop in the next couple of days,
as the proud housing of an 8 Gb drive, and this is (almost) exactly the 
method I'm planning.

In my case the only CD for it is PCMCIA based, so I'm going to boot off a
floppy, the rest is much the same. 
 
> Thanks for your help.
> 
> /caa

Have fun with your new disk space :)

* Heather Stern * star@ many places...