[PLUG] Dual Boot Troubles

[Jason Barnett]

Yes, that process should work, but there is an easier way. If you have
access to a IDE to USB adapter (I have one I would be willing to loan) just
swap out the drives, boot from a live linux CD then use dd to copy straight
from the old laptop drive to the new one.  Once done, use gparted to resize
the partitions to take advantage of the larger hard drive and it should be
fine.

Jason

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 7:26 AM, Richard C. Steffens <rsteff at comcast.net>wrote:

> In the spring of 2006 I bought an Acer Aspire 1640Z laptop. Yesterday I
> upgraded the RAM to 2 GB and bought a 320 GB hard drive for it so I
> could have both Win XP and Linux on it in a dual boot configuration.
>
> Step one was to install XP. After a half an hour of searching all the
> places I store CDs I finally remembered that this laptop did not come
> with a Windows CD. Instead "they" had me burn one. I ran across
> something on the Internet that said this was not uncommon. Anyway, I
> found the CD I burned labeled "Acer Aspire 1640Z Factory Default Image"
> dated Saturday, May13, 2006. I put that CD in the drive and powered up
> the machine. I watched it run for about 25 minutes with everything
> looking normal until it died with the message, "NTLDR IS MISSING".
>
> Googling showed me that there are a number of likely causes but none of
> the ones I tried made any difference.
>
> I decided to move on to my Ubuntu install, which worked just fine. When
> Ubuntu gave me the option for partitioning I gave the XP partition about
> 80 GB, which is the size of the old drive, and left the rest for Ubuntu.
>
> I thought that when Ubuntu was finished I'd be able to look at the dual
> boot options and see if there was something to tweak on the XP side.
> When the Ubuntu install (10.04, if it matters) was finished I booted up
> and saw something flash by before Ubuntu loaded. It said something about
> there not being something. It went by fast enough that I couldn't tell
> what it said, but I guess it's related to not having a bootable XP where
> it was looking.
>
> At this point I'm looking for alternatives. One I can think of is to
> somehow do the low level copy of the old drive to the new one which
> would give me my existing XP. While it would be nice to start with a
> clean install, I don't have any real problems with the old one. Is this
> a practical solution? If not, are there other solutions?
>
> I expect that I'll have to open up my desktop machine, disconnect one of
> the hard drives on it, connect the laptop drive (I have the little gizmo
> that adjusts the connection size to fit) and use dd to put an image of
> the 35 GB C: drive on my desktop machine. One of the partitions on this
> machine has 45.2 GB available. After that I'd swap out the old laptop
> drive, put in the new laptop drive and reverse the process.
>
> Is that enough to make it bootable, or is there some other magic I need
> to do to the new drive's MBR? Could it be that said magic is what's
> missing from yesterday's work?
>
> Thanks for any ideas.
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Dick Steffens
>
>
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