On Tuesday, November 08, 2011 02:02:14 PM you wrote: > 2. using dd and an external USB drive enclosure that mounts an external > drive as /dev/sdX for some X, clone the drive from my wife's machine to > this drive. As I only have a USB 2 interface on the enclosure, and > neither her nor my laptop has USB 3 ports, this dd will take > approximately 24 hours.
Use your eSATA port; the 8530p's specification page lists one. This will be much much faster than USB2; 320GB shouldn't take more than three or four hours using something like ddrescue booted off a LiveCD and using a Thermaltake BLACX eSATA dock. I've used eSATA (using an ExpressCard eSATA interface) for cloning my laptop's drive for a couple of years, now. Makes a great deal of difference. I'm not sure whether the SL 6.1 LiveCD includes ddrescue or not. I use ddrescue for a couple of reasons; first, it provides a progress indication without having to send the dd process a SIGUSR1 from another shell; second, it intelligently blocks and can be some faster than dd. Otherwise your procedure doesn't look unreasonable.
