Restoring the contents of my previous laptop’s hard drive was a bit more complicated than I thought. I got a firewire/usb box I could stick the hard drive into, and Mac OS X easily showed the FAT partitions of the drive when I plugged it in using firewire. However, there was no way to make that firewire drive visible inside VMWare or Parallels to actually access the Linux partitions. An attempt with USB failed because USB doesn’t provide enough power to the drive, and of course the external power source was nowhere to be found, since “firewire is superior”. OK, today I got a new box with two USB connections, one to just provide extra power. Excellent! Now when I plugged it in, Mac OS X showed me the FAT partitions. I unmounted them (dragging them to Trash, which currently is clever enough to look like an eject button when you’re dragging a drive into it), then in the settings of my VMWare’d Ubuntu, selected the USB drive and checked “connect”. Click on Apply, and lo and behold, Ubuntu started mounting the partitions and opening them for me.
OK, nearly there. However, I was using LVM2 on most of the partitions, so I needed something else. Specifically this:
vgscan
lvmscan
vgchange -a y
Then I could just mount all of my logical volumes, and start moving the data to my new laptop.
Meanwhile, I installed NeoOffice, Transmission and Kiiboard. KeyJNote is distributed in source form, so I’m still figuring that out – seems I need to install quite a bit of Python using MacPorts.
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