[PLUG-TALK] Noisy Notebook Drive

Rogan Creswick creswick at gmail.com
Thu Jun 5 16:12:10 UTC 2008


On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 7:38 AM, Richard C. Steffens <rsteff at comcast.net> wrote:
> Thanks. Yes, mirror was a poor choice of word. I remembered that "copy"
> does not produce the correct results, though, so I looked for a
> different word. As I recall, dd is the correct tool.

Disclaimer: It's been ages since I did anything at all with Win 98,
and when I last tried what you're suggesting (but with XP) it didn't
work.

If I'm remembering correctly, you can skip the MBR/booting mess with
Win 98, and in linux simply:

* Mount the new empty partition (ideally at the "front" of the new
drive) at /media/newWin
* Mount the old win 98 partition at /media/oldWin
* sudo cp -a /media/oldWin/* /media/newWin
* Power off, put the new drive where it belongs, and then just install
Linux.  The Linux installer should be able to figure out what to do to
set up grub so you can dual-boot.

I'm not sure that you can easily copy the data to a smaller partition
with dd, but the steps above should work.  (and either way, you've
always got the old drive if it fails to work, so you can try again.)

Does anyone have any tips for doing exactly the same thing with XP? (I
*think* the boot process is different enough that XP complicates
things..)

--Rogan



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