I have an ACER laptop and it is running out of disk space. Can I buy another drive and just get it installed?

I am running Linux (Ubuntu 9.10, I just want to add a new drive, maybe one terabyte??)

Can I just buy a drive and take it to say Pantip Plaza and get it installed/

Any advice appreciated...

I am in Chiang Mai.

Colin

I doubt there is room for two hard-drives. so you will have to replace the old one with a new one,there is a way to clone your old hard-drive, so it would be as simple as just taking pout the old and putting in the new. Without cloning the old, you will have to do a reinstall of ubuntu.

I suspect you could also add a USB drive (but don't run Lixux so could be wrong). I have several TB hooked to my Acer. The only problem child I have is a Freeagent Seagate that hangs boot-up if not removed (a known issue which they have never provided a solution for).

It's often a good idea when you upgrade a disk to perform a clean install. Not saying that Linux needs it as much as Windows, but we often install various programmes and then decide we aren't going to use them again and there they are taking up space and possibly resources.

There is an easy way with Ubuntu to get back to where you were; copy /home/Niloc (or whatever your username is) to an external drive. Then open up your file browser and go to "/". Do a search for *.deb and copy all those over to a folder in your external drive. Pull the internal drive out and replace with the new one. Install Ubuntu. Connect the external drive and copy over the /home/Niloc folder. You may need to change permissions (?). Open a terminal and navigate to the folder where all your *.deb's are. Run sudo dpkg -i *.deb to reinstall all the programmes and updates you had applied to your old system. That should get you up and going in a way that even you could handle with minimum fuss.

Alternatively you could create a clone of your hard drive using dd or use Clonezilla, which while not pretty is MUCH more user friendly and allows you to do it yourself....

Yesterday I bought a 500 gig drive, installed Ubuntu and away it went!!

I kept the old 160 gig drive for my desktop so it its just a matter of fiddling to get it to work...

The ACER uses SATA drives so no problem....

Colin

Buy an external case and use the old drive as backup for critical data.