On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Tod Thomas <fr33zone(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I know this is a little off topic. I did google around looking for
the
correct forum to post this question but had little luck. If anyone can make
an informed suggestion I'd very much appreciate it.
I have a 150GB ATA disk, /dev/hdb, containing winxp. I'd like to move the
contents to an spare 80GB ATA disk, /dev/hda, to make room for a full
install of FC10 on the larger disk in preparation for ultimately getting the
winxp install running under a linux based VM.
From knoppix, I started by using ntfsresize to shrink the xp partition down
to 20GB. That worked suprisingly fine.
I then installed the smaller drive and used dd to copy over the image of the
xp installation: dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hda bs=10000000 count=2000
I rebooted and voila! it worked - sort of. The new disk boots xp but it
still, according to fdisk, thinks its 150GB. So I used fdisk to delete and
redefine the xp partition (primary, bootable type=7) with the new size of
the drive, 20GB. After rebooting xp came up but then started quickly blue
screening a message I couldn't read, and rebooting. This repeated in a loop
until I just rebooted. I tried the whole process over again but this time
specified 80GB to dd and fdisk, same disaster.
I tried everything again, but this time instead of fdisk I fired up gparted
to see if I could resize from there hoping that if it could some magic would
also fix the invalid sizing detected by fdisk. gparted could see the drive
but couldn't recognize it as having anything it could work with. I
highlighted the drive and the progress bar stayed gray.
So far it seems I can use the drive this way without causing xp any
problems. The issue is things just don't look right and I suspect it will
come back to bite me one day. I'm not an expert at manipulating bits on a
hard drive just yet. Could someone point me to my error? Is what I'm
trying do-able? If its a conceptual problem a little education would come
in handy too.
I wouldn't use dd for this. Gparted has been more helpful to me in a
situation similar to yours. Using Gparted (a) I'd first create a NTFS
partition (make sure to create it As Primary),
(b) copy the partition from the source drive to the target drive, and
(c) if there's
a problem booting the target drive with xp in it, use a winxp cd to go into
rescue mode and use FIXMBR to fix the master boot record.
Gparted copies partitions pretty well.
~af