[Sluglug] IDE HD transfer and crossover cables.

[cerise at armory.com]

On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 05:47:52PM -0700, Erich wrote:
> On 10/5/05 5:22 PM, "Ignacio Solis" <isolis at igso.net> wrote:
> > Yes.
> > 
> > You can also remove your main drive. Install new drive there. Copy files over
> > with a livecd. Move new drive to old drive. Put back system drive, reboot.

   One of my favorite tricks in the world for this sort of situation is to
put the two drives in, boot with a Gentoo livecd, cat /dev/olddrive >
/dev/newdrive and then use parted to resize it.  If the disk is bootable, then
you'll need to rerun your boot loader at this point.

> The second IDE channel is being occupied by my CD-RW and DVD-ROM. Though
> honestly, I doubt I will ever use the DVD-ROM... But I think I would still
> like to keep it.

   It never hurts to be able to do a disc-to-disc copy.  It's likely (though
not certain) that your DVD-ROM is a faster drive.
 
> No SATA drives, so I don't need to worry about them now.
> 
> How do I know if I have an IDE-RAID controller? I have a DIF Gigabit
> LanParty Extreme nForce 3 250g motherboard. If I have one, how do I use it?

   Assuming the best case (you have blank disks), you'd go into the bios for
the RAID controller, let it know which drives you want RAIDed, wait some
extended period of time listening to beautiful sounds on your disk drives,
put linux on the box (compiling a kernel with RAID support for your drive) and
mount /dev/md0.
   In the slightly worse case, you can use software RAID, though it'll make
your kernel significantly larger.

-Phil/CERisE