SSD

Reimaged Windows laptop for dual Windows-Fedora boot.

June 6, 2021 Incoherent ramblings , , , , , , , ,

I used my funky usb-C external drive enclosure to facilitate an operating system switcheroo today.  I wanted to try a Windows/Linux dual boot configuration, something that I haven’t done in a long time.  There was enough room on the original 1Tb SSD, but I’d bought myself a 2Tb SSD for backups (and crypto-mining experimentation) and decided to repurpose that as a replacement drive for my Windows (xpg) laptop.

Since both my new and old drives were both M2 SSD drives, I was able to pop the old drive and put it into my external enclosure.  If I messed up reinstalling either Windows or Linux, then at least theoretically, I could have recovered by just putting the old drive back in.

I didn’t mess up the installation and now have a brand new dual boot configuration with Windows-10 and Fedora-34.  I’ve got WSL-2 + ubuntu-20 on the Windows side:

and a grub boot selector for the operating systems:

and the Fedora-34 desktop configuration for the native Linux installation:

I opted for Fedora over Ubuntu, since I figured both track the state of the art fairly well, but with Fedora I don’t have to keep looking up the dpkg equivalents of the rpm commands I’ve used for so many years and have memorized.

I have a whole bunch of install fine tuning to do still, but have all the bare bones now installed on both sides.

Having an external enclosure for the SSD made migration really easy.  I was able to mount it after my Windows reinstall was done, and just move my old \Users\peete directory.  I’ll have to weed out the bits that I don’t care about, but I’m now ready to blast away the partitions from the original laptop installation, and then use that 1Tb drive for backups and file transfers between machines.

New (pretty) SDD enclosure and backup drive.

April 20, 2021 mac osX , , , ,

The SSD on my 2015 era macbook died, but once I got a new machine, I was pretty impressed how well the MacOS restore from time machine worked.  It was dog slow, and took over 24hrs, but I got back all my work, and most of the MacOS configuration too.

The new macbook has ONLY usb-C ports.  Luckily, I had the foresight to order a thunderbolt-2 to USB-C adapter with the new macbook for the monitors, so I was able to use one of my monitors as a USB hub to access my old time machine drive.  The time machine backups on my old macbook, with the drive plugged in directly, never seemed that slow, so I think that some of the slow restore was due to this indirect connection.  However, some of that must also have been due to the older magnetic drive too.

Having just gone through a harddrive failure scenerio, backup and restore speed seemed worth spending some additional resources on, so I went ahead and splurged on a new ASUS NVM SSD enclosure:

This direct connects USB-C to USB-C, and is currently equipped with a 2Tb SSD.  It is also really pretty.

I went ahead and enabled time machine encryption on this drive, and was able to do a full (0.7Tb) backup in about 4hrs, even with encryption enabled!  The big 2Tb NVM drive wasn’t cheap, but has lots of space for incremental backups of the macbook’s 1Tb drive.

It is easy to swap out the SSD, so I can use this enclosure to backup my windows machine too (provided I buy an additional drive.)