Maybe O/T: Cloned dual boot HDD using Clonezilla now XP won't boot

[Gary Stainburn]

Hi folks.

I've just had to clone the HDD on my DELL Vostro 1510 laptop. I've replaced 
the old 300GB Toshiba drive with a new 1TB Tosh using a doner PC running 
Clonezilla. Having the manually fdisk the new drive to select the new 
partition sizes was interesting but otherwise a great product.

Everything seems to have copied across okay, with the GRUB loader and my 
Fedora 19 system both working fine.

However, despite the NTFS partition appearing to have copied successfully when 
I select WinXP to boot, the screen goes black in text mode with the cursor 
flashing in the top left corner. There is no HDD activity and nothing 
happens.

Can anyone point me to a possible answer. Is it something I need to do to GRUB 
or is it XP that has the problem? I think it may be the former as XP doesn't 
even seem to start.
-- 
Gary Stainburn
Group I.T. Manager
Ringways Garages
http://www.ringways.co.uk

[Doug]

On 03/20/2014 06:41 AM, Gary Stainburn wrote:
>  I can mount the partition in Fedora and everything looks fine.
>
>  fdisk shows the same partition table as on the old drive - apart from the
>  increase in size of sda1 and sda6.
>
>  However, if I boot from the WinXP CD and try to recover the system it says no
>  hard drives detected. As the HDD appears in the BIOS and obviously works to
>  let me boot Fedora I'm guessing it just means that it can't see the NTFS
>  partition.
>
>  This does maybe mean now that GRUB is fine (as Fedora boots) and the problem
>  is with the NTFS partition.
>
>  Anyone got any suggestions?
>
>  
You must "activate" the Windows system (partition?) in order to boot
any Windows. I just went thru it with Windows 8, having copied it
from a defective hard drive. (By itself on the old drive, it worked,
but other things didn't.) The "activate" command in GParted did
not do the job. One of the following two programs--I think the
second--had the proper command that worked. If I remember,
you can't run them from the unbootable system! Anyway, the
programs are free and downloadable from the internet.

EaseUs Todo Backup

DriveImage XML

Now I can boot into Windows without any trouble, from the
GRUB menu. (Using legacy grub with PCLOS.)

BTW: someone on one of these lists pointed out that as long as
anti-malware programs exist and can be used for XP, there is
not a real good reason that you would have to ditch it. I tried
to update an old Dell laptop to Windows 7 and found it was just
too slow to live with. Depending on what you do with your machine,
you might want to just live with a Linux distro and forget XP.
I find that there are only a very few programs that I need Windows for,
like AutoCAD and WordPerfect, and a programming update for
Garmin GPS. The first two will not run in WINE, don't know about
Garmin.

--doug

[Rick Stevens]

On 03/20/2014 07:06 AM, Mark Haney issued this missive:
>  -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>  Hash: SHA1
>
>
>
>  On 03/20/14 05:26, Gary Stainburn wrote:
>
> >
> > Can anyone point me to a possible answer. Is it something I need to
> > do to GRUB or is it XP that has the problem? I think it may be the
> > former as XP doesn't even seem to start.
> >
>
>  I'll take a stab at it.  How big is the WinXP partition?  IIRC, XP
>  didn't really like big boot partitions.  If WinXP can't find the HDD,
>  it may be the drive geometry is beyond what XP can handle.
>
>  (Like a said, just a stab. I've never been good with knives.) 
I missed this bit, but are you using a GPT (parted) or MBR partition
table? The MBR mechanism has a 2TB/disk limit (using 512-byte sectors).
If you bump the sector size to larger (e.g. 4KB), then it becomes 16TB.
Problem is that WinXP doesn't understand GPT, so if you're using GPT
you can't use XP. Later versions of Winblows (Vista, 7, 8, etc.) do
understand GPT.

Also remember that after April 8, XP support ends. I think you can buy
a Win 8 OEM DVD for about $125 and I think you can update your existing
XP to that without losing data. If not, then use Linux to back up your
XP data and install fresh, but get the devil off Winblows XP.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital    ricks(a)alldigital.com -
- AIM/Skype: therps2        ICQ: 22643734            Yahoo: origrps2 -
-                                                                    -
- Life:  That which happens while you search for the remote control. -
----------------------------------------------------------------------

[Mark Haney]

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Hash: SHA1



On 03/20/14 05:26, Gary Stainburn wrote:

>  
>  Can anyone point me to a possible answer. Is it something I need to
>  do to GRUB or is it XP that has the problem? I think it may be the
>  former as XP doesn't even seem to start.
>   
I'll take a stab at it.  How big is the WinXP partition?  IIRC, XP
didn't really like big boot partitions.  If WinXP can't find the HDD,
it may be the drive geometry is beyond what XP can handle.

(Like a said, just a stab. I've never been good with knives.)

- -- 
Mark Haney
Network/Systems Administrator
Practichem
W: [phone]
Fedora release 20 (Heisenbug) 3.13.6-200.fc20.x86_64
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[Gary Stainburn]

I can mount the partition in Fedora and everything looks fine.

fdisk shows the same partition table as on the old drive - apart from the 
increase in size of sda1 and sda6.

However, if I boot from the WinXP CD and try to recover the system it says no 
hard drives detected. As the HDD appears in the BIOS and obviously works to 
let me boot Fedora I'm guessing it just means that it can't see the NTFS 
partition.

This does maybe mean now that GRUB is fine (as Fedora boots) and the problem 
is with the NTFS partition.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk label type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x926c926c

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1            2048   524290047   262144000    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2       524290048   525723647      716800   83  Linux
/dev/sda3       525723648   534112255     4194304   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4       534112256  1953525167   709706456    5  Extended
/dev/sda5       534114304   743829503   104857600   83  Linux
/dev/sda6       743831552  1953525167   604846808   83  Linux

Command (m for help): 
[root@gary ~]# mount|grep sda
/dev/sda5 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,seclabel,data=ordered)
/dev/sda2 on /boot type ext4 (rw,relatime,seclabel,data=ordered)
/dev/sda1 on /windows type fuseblk 
(rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,blksize=4096)
/dev/sda6 on /home type ext4 (rw,relatime,seclabel,data=ordered)
[root@gary ~]#
-- 
Gary Stainburn
Group I.T. Manager
Ringways Garages
http://www.ringways.co.uk