In message <20020524212730.A6824@noc.untraceable.net>, Andrew Brown writes:
>my current laptop drive is dying (which is not to say that ide is bad,
>or laptops...i doubt a scsi drive would do that much better in a
>laptop).  two years ain't all that bad for a laptop (i got the laptop
>a little over two years ago) i carry around all the time.
>
>i got a new one.  the old one is 11.5 gigs.  the new one is 40.  two
>things come to mind.
>
>(1) i had planned on simply expanding inflating the size of the
>partitions currently allocated to all operating systems (win98 came
>with the laptop, freebsd is good to play with occasionally, and
>netbsd) from what they get now (out of 11) to something larger all
>around.  suppose i move my netbsd partition to something a little
>beyond the 10 gig mark (with / occupying ~3-400 megs at the
>front)...will netbsd still be able to boot (using mbr_bootsel and
>biosboot.sym)?
>
>(2) to move the win98 partition, i had planned on simply allocating
>it, newfs'ing it (for msdos) and tarring/untarring the current file
>system.  is that likely to work, or not to work?
>

Umm -- I'd worry about boot sectors, path names too long for tar, etc.

When I've copied laptop drives -- and I've done it a fair number of 
times -- I use the utility that's almost always included with the new 
drive (I upgrade laptops -- it's *always* a pain) to copy the Windows 
partition, and then use tar or dump/restore to move the Unix files.  
Actually, I generally do a clean install on the new drive, and then 
copy over /home/smb.

As for booting -- my guess is that with a new laptop, you won't have 
any problems; the new BIOSes can handle large disks, and I think that 
NetBSD can as well at this point.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
		http://www.wilyhacker.com ("Firewalls" book)