[PLUG] Hot swapping physical /home partitions - Possible? Practical alternative?

[Michael Christopher Robinson]

On Sat, 2019-04-27 at 13:08 -0500, Richard Owlett wrote:
> Yes, my question is as strange as the subject line ;o>
> 
> The hard drive on my old desktop is dying.
> I've copied the /home partition to a flash drive.
> I've a laptop with 3 separate configurations of Debian installed.
> Each is optimized for different goals.
> The fstab file of each references the same physical partition as
> /home.
> 
> Ideally I want the most recent install to be able to "hot swap"
> between 
> the the two "home partitions".
> 
> Alternatively would it be possible to chose between 2 different
> fstab 
> files at boot time?
> 
> Is there a sane alternative?
> 
> TIA
> 
> 
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So it's a desktop computer that your hard drive is dying on
and you have your laptop accessing your Desktop for it's home
partition?  Can you replace the dying hard drive on your desktop
computer?  How old is your desktop system?  If it's modern enough
to support at least SATA I, you should be able to buy a new hard 
drive.  Anything pre SATA you are looking at a rebuilt PATA drive
or maybe a rebuilt SCSI drive or FIREWIRE drive depending on what 
you have.  Your most robust option may be to build a new computer,
unless the hard drive is easily replaced.

If the hard drive is easily replaced, make sure you have clonezilla
handy.  If not easily replaced, look into a new desktop system. 
Honestly, I'd go to freegeek for help.

If a hard drive is dying, you need to get it repaired or replaced.  At
any moment you will get data corruption or else you simply won't be
able to access everything anymore.  Repair can be very expensive, even
if you have good backups.  It involves a clean room and possibly
replacing the heads or something similar.  I don't understand why you
would even want to mount a dying hard drive on /home on a running Linux
system.  You want to take a dying hard out of service before it takes
itself out of service for you.

If your motherboard can handle 500G and bigger hard drives, consider
getting a SATA III 500G drive.  If the mobo has PATA connectors, 
there are adapters to go from SATA to PATA.  In short, a full hardware
description of your desktop is needed to give you sane good advice.

     -- Michael C. Robinson