SATA ftw!

Last week I was not so happy, when I discovered that the drive in my Macbook had developed some bad blocks. Oops. So I ordered a replacement on Newegg and it arrived today. Now, how to easily copy my data - preferably the entire partition - over to the new drive in the shortest amount of time and also switching from reiserfs to ext3 (never ever reiser again, if I loose one more file...) without additional adapters, external enclosures, backing up back and forth to desktop and so on.

Well, with PATA drives I would at least have needed a connector for that mini-IDE thingy - not so with my SATA drive. The 15-pin power adapter supplies not only the 12 volt of my regular hard drive but also the 5 for my notebook hd and the data cables are just so nice and easy. This should have happened ten years ago..

So, long story short: I booted my desktop with the old SATA disk attached, mounted, started the Macbook with the Gentoo installation cd and used the rsync daemon to copy everything over.
Yay!

Disclaimer: Ok, i didn't mention installing OS X first, then BootCamp & refit and after all running /sbin/lilo after adjusting /etc/fstab for the different filesystem but who is going to change filesystems and doing all this on a Macbook anyway..