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

Doug dmcgarrett at optonline.net
Thu Mar 20 18:56:49 UTC 2014


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


More information about the users mailing list