Notes on replacing Tisiphone's hard disk

Yet another faulty hard disk…

1. Restoring the home partition from a gz-compressed image with the aid of an Ubuntu live CD: uncompressing the image directly onto the target partition took ages, especially as the amount of uncompressed data is the actual partition size and not what's on it.
   It was considerably faster to uncompress the image in place (even regarding the bottlenecks of booting from CD and the USB connection to the external drive), mounting it and just copying the contents. (see daWuzzz's contributions on gzipped images and image mounting)
2. Just a reminder: only copy the bare necessities using a live system. USB data throughput was about four times slower compared to copying with a system on disk.
3. Importing users from a previous installation, using the copied home partition: This is a bit tricky, as the installer DVD actually needs an existing installation to read from. Inelegant solution: first do a dummy install setting up fresh users with the same properties (easiest way in a single-user environment), then format the home partition and copy your user data, and finally install the OS again, this time importing the user from the dummy setup using your previous home directory. Alternatively, restore both your old root and home partitions before the fresh install and import the users from there (cumbersome if you had a lot of data on the root partition).
   Other variants I tried but ran into problems with: create a new user and use the old home (KWallet password fail); formatting and rewriting the home partition after the system install (ate my GRUB)
   
4. Opensuse 11.2 still reports a failure on the network connection during install despite obviously being able to download release notes
   .