Prepping my Computer (for a conference, but that part doesn’t matter)
Update July 24, 2014: I’m using these exact directions with Linux Mint, which is my current preferred Linux Distro.
Note: I thought I posted this last January, but it appears I didn’t.Â
This post could be re-titled “Why I Love Linux” because it requires Linux.
Like many other transportation geeks, I’m getting ready to go to this little conference in Washington, DC. Â I’ve been getting things together because I found out a few years ago that being stuck in DC with problematic technology (like a bad cell phone battery) is no fun. Â And to top it all off, my laptop feels like it has a failing hard drive.
So I booted into Ubuntu and used Disk Utility to check the SMART status via disk utility. Â Which claims everything is fine.
Still, though, I didn’t receive any disk with my laptop (it instead has a rescue partition) and my intuition disagrees with what my disk drive thinks of itself, so I decided the smart thing to do would be to arm myself with a few good USB flash drives.
The first USB flash drive is a live image of Ubuntu or Mint (or many other distros).
The second is my rescue partition image that can be restored to a new drive. Â I got this by:
- Getting an image file using the ntfsclone command:
sudo ntfsclone -o rescue.img /dev/sda4
Where /dev/sda4 is the Lenovo rescue partition (as indicated in Disk Utility)
- Compress the rescue image
gzip rescue.img
- Split the image into 1 GB bits
split -b 1024m rescue.img.gz
(note: steps 2 and 3 can be combined with gzip rescue.img |split -b 1024m
I then copied these to a USB flash drive.
