From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Mar 5 14:16:38 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail4.nc.rr.com (fe4.southeast.rr.com [24.93.67.51]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DC3D037B400 for ; Tue, 5 Mar 2002 14:16:34 -0800 (PST) Received: from i8k.babbleon.org ([66.57.85.154]) by mail4.nc.rr.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.687.68); Mon, 4 Mar 2002 23:35:34 -0500 Received: by i8k.babbleon.org (Postfix, from userid 111) id 9232BBA03; Mon, 4 Mar 2002 23:34:59 -0500 (EST) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From: Brian T.Schellenberger To: Peter Leftwich , "Zac M. Speidel" Subject: Re: Installing FreeBSD to Sony Vaio Laptop? Experts.. Please help =) Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 23:34:59 -0500 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.3] Cc: References: <20020304225651.B96680-100000@earl-grey.cloud9.net> In-Reply-To: <20020304225651.B96680-100000@earl-grey.cloud9.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-Id: <20020305043459.9232BBA03@i8k.babbleon.org> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Monday 04 March 2002 11:12 pm, Peter Leftwich wrote: > {I had a question related to this inquiry; May I bounce in with it?} > > I am considering -- i.e. fantasizing, way down the road from now -- > changing from a workstation (PC) to a laptop for my primary (sole) computer > needs. Is there a simple way -- or any way -- what's the easiest, neatest > procedure to transfer everything including the OS as I have tweaked it so > far? I would rather not have to *install* a working copy of FreeBSD on the > laptop then migrate data over. I would not recommend that you attempt such a thing. In all liklihood, your hardware, from disk drives to video cards to everything else will be different, so this seems unlikely to work as well as you'd hope it would. That said, the easiest way to "mirror" it over would be to do a minimal install on the laptop and then just "rsync" the system from the other machine. You can always try this and it works well, great. If it doesn't, no big loss--just do an install the old-fashioned way. Either way, it'll surely be easiest to do an initial install on the laptop and mount them to each other over the network in order to sync the systems up. I did this recently (well, not over the network, over USB, but it's the same idea) to restore my system after Windows 98 decided that during its install it would be a good idea to completely reformat my FreeBSD partition, and it worked quite well. FWIW, I've been using a laptop as my primary system ever since my Amiga 1000 gave up the ghost around 1995. I ran Linux, then FreeBSD, then Linux, and now FreeBSD. (In the early days laptops were a real rarity on either system and every time I upgraded hardware I'd wind up switching to to the system that suppported that hardware best. Now I have the luxury of just choosing the O/S whose behavior I prefer--plus I choose the hardware for the O/S rather than the other way 'round.) > > Is the best bet some sort of boot floppy then a "mv" command or disk-image- > across-network ghosting sort of process? I could hook up the PC and the > laptop via USB or something :) Wouldn't ethernet be easier / more straightforward? > Any notions or stories from the trenches of > anyone who has successfully done this appreciated. -- Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . . bts@wnt.sas.com (work) Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal) ME --> http://www.babbleon.org http://www.eff.org <-- GOOD GUYS --> http://www.programming-freedom.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message