On 14 August 2013 12:19, Peter Alefounder <p_alefounder@???> wrote:
> Daniel Llewellyn <diddledan@???> said:
> > your mouse might be ps/2 as might your keyboard,
>
> Mouse is USB (but came with an adaptor plug for ps/2), keyboard is
> PS/2. If I must have a new keyboard, so be it. Scanner is USB.
>
You may be OK with just the one ps/2 "thingy" as some motherboards come
with a dual-purpose single ps/2 port which can take either a keyboard or a
mouse but not both.
Thought so! The shop I got the parts from, m2 on Shirley High Road,
> Southampton, vanished years ago. Not sure where to get such bits
> now, so it might be easier for me to buy a complete system, which
> would also solve the problem of getting a new operating system.
>
Novatech have a shop in Portsmouth and are available online at
www.novatech.co.uk. I've found them very good though I've only purchased
parts off them rather than requested information or support from them.
Alternatively there are online-only suppliers such as dabs.com and
scan.co.uk.
> Supposing I had a new system on a new disk, would any problems arise
> from having an old system on the old disk? Am I right in thinking
> that I can set the machine to only boot off the new disk? Likewise,
> any problem from having a /home on both disks?
>
(tl;dr: the below is quite a long missive, if you don't want to read it
all, suffice to say you should be fine with having both discs side-by-side)
there will be an option in the bios/efi (efi replaces the bios of old) to
determine which drive to boot from, and a key-press can likely be used to
override the default (usually f11). there will be no issue with having both
drives in the system simultaneously unless you accidentally install the new
os onto the wrong one and wipe out your old files. If you're at all worried
about that possibility I'd advise installing the new system and then
plugging the old drive into the machine afterwards.
In linux-land partitions are usually mounted according to rules specified
in /etc/fstab where you will currently have an entry on the old drive for
the home partition to be mounted in the correct place. on the new system
this rule won't point to the old partition so your new home partition (if
you create one) will be mounted at /home when booted into the new OS and
the old home partition will be when booted into the old OS. if you don't
create a replacement home partition you can either use the old home
partition as-is by specifying in the installer or by editing /etc/fstab
after install, or you can not have one at all and just keep /home on the
root partition's file-system. the old partitions won't be mounted unless
you specify for them to be so in /etc/fstab (excepting maybe any swap
partitions, which wouldn't be an issue to share unless you use hibernate to
save power instead of turning off the system - I just leave mine running
:-p).
If you don't specify any auto-mounting of the old partitions you might
still be able to access them in the file manager as modern nautilus (Gnome)
and Dolphin (KDE) and similar will detect any unmounted partitions that are
readable and provide them in a list for click-able activation whereby it
will mount the selected partition in a temporary location such as
/media/file-system-label on Ubuntu. (where file-system-label is the name
given to the file-system which might be "home" on your home partition but
can be arbitrary. it might instead be a uuid which is a supposedly unique
identifier that is created at format time for a file-system. the UUID is
used in this instance when a file-system doesn't have a label)
===
sidenote about UUIDs:
UUIDs can also be used on modern distros in the fstab to replace usage of
/dev/sd* block device files. this allows for more accurate partition
detection in case your bios moves discs about in each subsequent boot,
which is the problem that enabling UUID use in the fstab was created to
combat. to determine the UUID of a partition do the following as root
(using su or sudo or logging in locally as root as appropriate):
blkid /dev/sdb2
this will output something like:
/dev/sdb2: UUID="ca30c43b-2d2a-4196-a936-be16a176c4aa" TYPE="ext2"
in fstab you can replace /dev/sdb2 (from my example) to give you the
following for the partition above to be mounted at /home:
UUID=ca30c43b-2d2a-4196-a936-be16a176c4aa /home ext2 defaults 0 0
NOTE the missing quotes around the UUID value where there are quotes in the
blkid output. this is a gotcha if you copy+paste.
--
Daniel Llewellyn
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