Turns out I’ve got an old PS3. Seems weird to say that but it is a very early version. It only had a 40Gb HDD, for example. So in order to take advantage of the PSN Welcome Back I had to upgrade my HDD.

Having read the instructions I knew that backing up, installing the new disk and restoring the system should be relatively simple. Still, I didn’t expect it to go quite as smoothly as it did.

So, Sunday, I went into town and bought a 320GB disk from yoyotech. They may not be the cheapest but they are competitive and working full-time is not very compatible with internet shopping, anyway.

Then, on Monday, my lovely wife borrowed an external HDD from work for me to do the back-up. Bless her.

I was pleasantly surprised that the PS3 backup routine uses a file structure that allows multiple, time-stamped back-ups on the same disk. That’s cool, eh? I did a couple of back-ups just to be sure and then dived in.

Actually changing the drive was easy. I’ve done loads of laptop HDD changes in the past and it was really no different. Although, I’ll wager the screws on the disk caddy weren’t tightened by a human. If they were, that human was having a bad day.

The restore was just as easy as the back-up. A couple of restarts later and everything was exactly as it had been before except now I have 8x the HDD space.

Kind of dull but I am delighted it was that easy. I really didn’t need any hassle!

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I picked up a Dell Optiplex SX280 from eBay last week with the intention of setting it up as a dedicated Linux box. Previously I have always worked with dual boots but I decided it was time to have the best of both worlds full-time.

The install went pretty well although it’s been a while since I did anything in Linux. I came a bit of a cropper trying to partition the hard disk. The auto partition scheme was great and worked fine but didn’t make a separate /var and /tmp, which I wanted. So, I resorted to doing it manually but was baffled by cfdisk and working with extended/logical partitions and the fact I couldn’t choose the FS I wanted. Naturally, I shortly discovered that cfdisk doesn’t make filesystems and that comes later in the install.

After that it all went pretty flawlessly. I have used Arch Linux a lot before so the set-up was pretty simple once the OS was actually installed.

Now to set up the services.