Adding a win2000 drive to mepis machine

you can move a linux drive and it will manage very well, but moving a windows drive and implanting it another machine has a very poor success rate.
options
move linux to windows box
run quickbooks inside a virtual machine
ups worldship doesn't have very high requirements - it may run inside a virtual machine too

Thanks for the suggestions. The linux drive is in the better machine but what if I took the linux drive out, put the windows one in and got it all happy, then put back the linux drive and setup the boot loader. I'm not familiar with virtual machines but will commence to do some homework on that. I've looked into running worldship under wine but noone seems to be doing that. Worldship is indispensible to me. Quickbooks I'd just as soon be done with but I have about a decades worth of business records in it so for the short term I'm stuck with that too.

thanks,

Mark

but be prepared to have to reinstall the windows, it does not like changing motherboards

As drlizau pointed out, be prepared for a Windows re-install.

If you have the room, or you can afford a bigger hard drive, you might try putting the bigger hard drive into your "good" box, and copying the contents of your Windows hard drive to it, say using Gparted Live CD. Then (re)load Linux onto it. If you have Windows playing nice on the new drive, you can then use tools like VMware or Parallels to "open" the Windows partition as a virtual machine. Both of these virtualization tools allow this but it is not recommended because you must always be aware that you should not DIRECTLY use that partition if it's currently being used by the virtual machine. If this seems like an approach that you might want to take, let us know and we can get more specific (without scaring you off)

A possible alternative to Quickbooks is an accounting tool called MoneyDance:
Moneydance® 2007 - Personal Finance Manager for Mac, Windows, and Linux
http://www.moneydance.com/

I do not currently use it, but I used it for many years when I jumped ship from Intuit's Quicken. MoneyDance will run on Windows, Macs, and Linux (and it does work in Mepis). They have a free trial version and you can see if it might address your needs.

Jon

The ability to comfortably use a computer is directly proportional to desire to listen, learn, and experiment, and is inversely proportional to the fear, anger, and stubbornness that you show.

I think what I will do for expediency is migrate the windows disk to the linux box as I described and see if I can get the dual boot working okay. I believe there is enough info on this site for me to get that done given my level of desire and willingness to experiment. I looked at Money Dance but I use quickbooks as a business application for invoicing and managing inventory etc and don't think a personal finance program will do it. I use gnucash for a smaller business operation I run and inspite of the fact that its a lot more rudimentary I like it. I just don't know if I can migrate the amount of essential information I have over with the time available. At any rate, thank you both for your help. I'm so enthusiastic about Mepis I can hardly sit still.

Mark

Sounds good Mark. Please post back with your successes (and any failures) to let us know how everything works. Any and all details are helpful

Jon

The ability to comfortably use a computer is directly proportional to desire to listen, learn, and experiment, and is inversely proportional to the fear, anger, and stubbornness that you show.

John,

In the end I pretty much reinstalled everything. The windows disk had some issues and a load of software that was useless to me so I re did it from the ground up. My mepis disk was kind of a cob job from earlier migrations from various distros where I'd endeavored with mixed success to save things so after I made it so I couldn't use it I opted to just reinstall it as well. This also let me make more sensible use of the idsk space.

worked great.

But I'm having a bit of trouble moving things back from the back up of my home directory to the new home directory. Mostly it seems on the face of it like permissions issues, but oddly enough - to me anyway - the backed up home directory has the permissions for a lot of files in the .kde directory set as root/root and when I use apps like kmail I get a lot of error messages about not being a proper file type or I have insufficient priviledges. I've been trouble shooting these one at a time and it's taking a while. Can you direct me anywhere for help with this?

Also, and this has happend to me before on a distro switch - my old mail messages apprear to be there until I try to access them then they 'go away'. The subject line gets set to no subject and the message in the preview window appears blank. I'm sure these problems are related. Is there a correct way to stick an old home directory in place of a new one? without these problems. I'll add that in my old system all my packages were up to date and so far I have only updated packages that I've tried to use hoping synaptic would take care any dependancy issues but I have quite a long list package updates to work through to get back to where I was.

I'll provide any info you'd like but this is the problem I'm having.

Mark

Hi Mark. Welcome back

There are a couple things going on here that are primarily related to permissions, but are also probably related to how you did your backup and/or restore of the data.

To bring me up to date, can you please provide a disk layout of your current system? You can do "cat /etc/fstab" to show the current disk partitions. Also, perform the "mount" command, and the "df" command to show how much disk space is being used. Now, how did you make your backup? Did you put it on an external drive? If so, what command(s) did you use to copy stuff to it?

Assuming that you really got a good backup (I'm keeping my fingers crossed), you can restore stuff to your new home area with a couple commands. These commands must be done as root, and it's actually easier to do at the command prompt.

I will make the assumption that your backup is on an external drive mounted at /mount/sdc1 and the home directory that you want to restore is /home/mark, do the following commmands:

$ su                # become root
password            # and enter root's password
# cd /home          # go above where you want to restore
# cp -a /mount/sdc1/home/mark /home/mark

The "-a" option above is the flag to "copy all" (including permissions. This is a recursive copy, so all hidden, and sub-directories in */home/mark will be copied. To be on the safe side (and if you have the disk space), you may want to copy to /home/marknew from your backup. Then, once it's been restored, change the name of your "real" /home/mark to /home/markold ("mv /home/mark /home/markold" without the quotes), and rename /home/marknew ("mv /home/marknew /home/mark" without quotes).

Oh, if you do follow the above instructions do not be logged in as you, since you will be essentially overwriting the directory. So really, you should log into your computer directly as root (then the "su" commands are not necessary). Sorry for the confusing instructions

The above instructions are also assuming that permissions on the backed up directories and files are those of your original system. If so, owner and group names for /home/mark should be "mark" for the owner, and "users" for the group. If not, we can change that.

Get back to me with whether this makes sense, and how you want to proceed.

Oh, the probable reason why kmail is making things "disappear" is that there's a very detailed (but consistent) directory structure underneath kmail. It is very easily corrupted if you copied the data back in the wrong way. So I would suggest that we start with trying to get your whole /home/user directory back first. You may find that kmail then works correctly too.

Jon

The ability to comfortably use a computer is directly proportional to desire to listen, learn, and experiment, and is inversely proportional to the fear, anger, and stubbornness that you show.

John,

Below are the results of fstab and the df command. What I did to back up was to essentially drag and drop the partitions onto an external hard drive and then back again using konqueror. What seems to have happened is that some part of the permissions got screwed up and reverted to root/root. I'm sure I was su when I copied the system partition. Probably I was for the home partition as well as there were several different user directories involved. For example. In .kde/share/apps/kmail/autosave/cur/ everything down to the last directory had mark/user permissions but the cur directory had root/root so on launch apparently kmail tries writing to this directory and could not so hence the error msg. In a related problem in the mail boxes everything had proper permissions except the actual files so when I loaded the kmail would populate the mail box dierctories with subject lines but when i actually tried opening a message the subject changed to 'no subject' and there was no text. Once I changed the permissions, by selecting all of the files in the cur directory, when I clicked on a file that said 'no subject' the subject came back and the text was again available. I don't know what rule was applied in writing permissions to the backup disk but they are wrong on it so I'm not sure a proper restoration is possible at this point. I've got most of the important things working now and know that when something behaves oddly I need to dig around in the permissions.

Long story but I think I learned something. To date I haven't used a proper back up program to save my work because I've always had problems with the devices. I noticed that fstab doesn't list the dvd player that is installed but at least for reading I can mount either the CD or DVD with the single entry in kwikdisk. I actually made the back ups I used with live cd becasue it always seems to be able to find and use any hardware present.

As far as the dual boot thing goes I had no problems whatever just following my nose through Install program on the disk. In the future I will exercise more care in creating backups, get my backup devices up and running for that purpose, and keep the instructions you included in your reply available.

Here are those files, and thanks for your help.

Mark

# Pluggable devices are handled by uDev, they are not in fstab
/dev/hdc1 / ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1
/dev/hdc2 swap swap sw,pri=1 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devmode=0666 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0622 0 0
none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hdc3 /home ext3 defaults,noatime 1 2
# Dynamic entries below, identified by 'users' option
/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 ntfs noauto,users,exec,ro,umask=0222 0 0
/dev/hda5 /mnt/hda5 ntfs noauto,users,exec,ro,umask=0222 0 0
/dev/hdc5 /mnt/hdc5 vfat,ext3,ext2,reiserfs noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/hdc6 /mnt/hdc6 auto noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom iso9660,udf noauto,users,exec,ro 0 0

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdc1 15480800 2425992 12268428 17% /
varrun 485032 124 484908 1% /var/run
varlock 485032 0 485032 0% /var/lock
udev 485032 140 484892 1% /dev
devshm 485032 0 485032 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdc3 34614104 1648344 31207448 6% /home

Mark, good to hear you ALMOST have everything back

I think one thing that happened that messed you up was when you tried to copy to/from using KDE. If you did not first turn on the option to "Show Hidden Files", then you can easily not copy them. As you probably know "hidden" files .startwithaperiod. And within .kde, and the various sub-sub-sub directories of the kmail system, there are a bunch of these hidden files and directories. If they are not all copied, then things go bad fast.

Fortunately, even if things are really, really bad, the underlying email message files are text based. So even if you might lose some context or formatting, you would still be able to recover the text of the messages.

There was a change in how things get loaded into /etc/fstab with the 6.x release. Prior to that time, ALL disk devices were listed in fstab. Now, with the udev thingy, "portable devices" like DVD/CDs and USB keys are handled by that tool. I haven't had enough time to play with the structure, so I cannot tell you where that information is kept. Sorry.

As to backup strategies, Man! we could go on for many posts there! Do a search through this forum, and mepislovers for backups. Also check out the magazine "Linux Journal" and look for Marcel Gagne (a favorite author of mine). He's written a lot about backup tools and strategies. The summary of it is this. There are free and for-pay tools, commands you can run from the command line, ways to copy things locally to/from remotely, automated and manual tools, and tools to copy directories or entire partitions. There, I think that covers all the combinations

Jon

The ability to comfortably use a computer is directly proportional to desire to listen, learn, and experiment, and is inversely proportional to the fear, anger, and stubbornness that you show.