Just upgraded your system with a shiny new hard disk and want to make it your new book disk? Cloning Ubuntu to another hard disk is easy. In fact, Ubuntu provides tools to clone the entire hard disk -- including the Windows partition, if there's one on there. This is the kind of fundamental task that Linux excels at, in fact.

The installation program on Ubuntu desktop is pretty basic. It lacks the other features, like support for LVM, RAID, and full disk encryption, that the Ubuntu text installer edition has. By default, it creates just one partition onto which it installs everything.

If you read our "what's new in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala" post, you must know that a new hard disk tool is now available by default in Ubuntu 9.10: Palimpsest Disk Utility, which was created by Red Hat and is a S.M.A.R.T.

Installing Ubuntu 11.04 or any other distribution on an external hard drive connected to a computer via USB is about the same as installing it on an internal hard disk. The key is to remember, after partitioning the disk, to install GRUB, the boot loader, in the MBR of the external disk, rather than in the MBR of the internal disk.

Clonezilla is a Ncurses-based front-end to a set of scripts that use several open source disk utilities such as Partimage, ntfsclone, Partclone and dd. It'll jump at your command and duplicate particular partitions, or better still complete disks. It'll also restore the partitions, and help you mirror an old disk onto a bigger new disk.

Many people leave their computers on around the clock. This usually implies that all the attached hard disks are always spinning. Constantly spinning up a hard disk normally increases the chances of drive failure. When a disk is not powered it should last longer than if it was spinning.

Linux and other Unix-like operating systems use the term "swap" to describe both the act of moving memory pages between RAM and disk, and the region of a disk the pages are stored on. It is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping.

You turn on your trusty old Linux box, and things are going well as you pass through the boot loader, until the disk check reveals that your hard drive partition table is corrupt, and you are unable to access your machine. You need a good rescue disk — and the best way to get one is to create your own.

You turn on your trusty old Linux box, and things are going well as you pass through the book loader, until the disk check reveals that your hard drive partition table is corrupt, and you are unable to access your machine. You need a good rescue disk -- and the best way to get one is to create your own.