I installed the new drive into the new computer. I'm going to transfer the home directory to a usb drive and then to the new computer. This is the command i tried and the result i got. stormy@stormy-desktop:~$ sudo dd if=/home/stormy of=/dev/sdc1 bs=1024k [sudo] password for stormy: dd: reading `/home/stormy': Is a directory 0+0 records in 0+0 records out 0 bytes (0 B) copied, 0.000942499 s, 0.0 kB/s stormy@stormy-desktop:~$ What is wrong there? i am such an idiot on command line stuff. aghhh. Thanks. betty i. Joseph Sinclair wrote: > First, I'd definitely recommend going with a new SATA drive on the new machine. You'll find everything just works better and the added reliability of a newer drive makes for a lot less stress (although regular and frequent backups are definitely the best peace-of-mind tool). > > For the data transfer there are 3 simple options: > 1) If you have, or can borrow, a large enough USB drive (flash or HDD), I'd copy everything (I prefer rsync, but dd is a good choice too) to the USB drive, then copy from that to the new computer. > 2) Temporarily install the old drive in the new machine on the ATA (CDROM) interface (if the new machine has an old-style ATA interface for the CD drives), and copy the data from one drive to the other (definitely use rsync here). > 3) Connect the two machines to an ethernet router/hub and use rsync to transfer the files over the ethernet connection. > > However you end up doing the transfer, I'd definitely recommend retaining a separate backup of all of your personal data (pictures, documents, music, videos, etc...) as part of the process, if at all possible. > -- betty i. www.webcanine.com information for people who care for dogs. --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss