I'll make this short. I thought that I was going to make a 3 hour process into a 90 minute process, but the whole thing took less than 1 hour.
Here are the particulars:
I work for a major health care network. Our new computer deployment is based on using a ghost image provided by some smug group of faceless something-or-others, that really don't give a shit about what the people that have to deal with their output have to deal with. So, one of my techs goes out to do a deployment, and after the fact, the user (don't get me started on the users) hands him a terabyte hard drive and says that she needs that installed. That would be easy enough, if the computers that we deploy had the facilities (space and connections) for a second hard drive.
Enter me. Given my company's business model, the tech finished what he was doing and left. So now, I have to deal with doing a re-image (20 minutes), running post-install (30 minutes), installing applications (just shoot me), and then doing a data transfer (shoot me twice).
Knowing what I was dealing with, I brought my SATA dock, a PartedMagic CD, a cup of coffee, and about 2 hours worth of paperwork. I was in and out within 1 hour. Through PartedMagic, I used Clonezilla to do a disc copy and Gparted to resize the partition. That took about 37 minutes. The next 15 minutes was spent swapping the drives, doing all of the reboots that WinBlows requires, and deleting the data from the old drive (it wasn't a DoD wipe, but I didn't take the drive - I left it with the department, for use as a backup, no HIPAA violation).
Nobody believed that I was done that fast. When asked, my answer was either "You wouldn't believe me,' or "You wouldn't understand." Such is the life of a Linux geek in a WinBlows shop.
