Swapping internal HDD's on a dual-boot Arch & WinXP system

RobF · 2010-08-11 10:52:36

I'm planning to swap the internal 160 GB SATA hard disk drive in my laptop for a new 320 GB SATA HDD. I'd like to retain the same partitioning scheme, as well as their present contents, except to make the various partitions larger. Windows XP is on sda1, my Arch system is on sda2, my Arch home partition is on sda6 (within an extended partition sda4), swap is on sda5, and sda3 & sda7 are reiserfs-formatted data partitions. Dual-booting Arch and Windows is handled by GRUB that was installed with Arch, i.e. GRUB was placed in the boot sector of the internal HDD.

By and large, what I have to do seems straightforward: Boot the PartedMagic live CD, plug in an external USB HDD, use the program 'partimage' to write single images of the various partitions of my internal HDD to the external HDD, then swap the old internal HDD for the new one, again boot PartedMagic, use GParted to partition and format the new internal HDD with the same scheme that I used before, then use partimage to restore the backed up partition images to their respective partitions on the new drive, and finally use GRUB to write its first part to the boot sector of the new drive.

So far so good, but I have two questions:

1. Windows XP/SP3 resides in a single partition (sda1) that's formatted for ntfs and for which the boot flag is set. When I use partimage to backup this partition, I would be saving a single 38 GB image file of this ntfs partition to a reiserfs-formatted data partition on the external backup drive. I'm assuming this can be done. Then I would be using partimage again to restore this partition image to sda1 on the new drive, i.e. I would be writing a single very big file from within Linux (i.e. the PartedMagic CD) to the new ntfs partition. Can that be done? I.e. is ntfs read/write support in Linux completely problem-free by now? Is this likely to work, i.e. would I be able to boot Windows XP from Arch's GRUB menu? Or should I better back up and restore Windows from within Windows, e.g. using Norton Ghost? What would be the most surefire method of getting my old Windows installation with all its files back on the new drive and have it be GRUB-bootable?

The entry in /boot/grub/menu.lst for Windows is as follows:
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

2. I'd been using the old GRUB (now called legacy GRUB, i.e. v.0.97) as a bootloader to set up the old internal HDD. The current PartedMagic CD (v.5.2) uses the new GRUB 2. Is this going to create a problem in making the new drive linux-bootable for my existing Arch and Windows partitions? What do I have to do with GRUB 2 to make the drive bootable and use the old GRUB menu and menu.lst file?

Inxsible · 2010-08-11 11:53:46

yes ntfs support is pretty good in linux, so there should not be any problem. Having said that, things can and often do go wrong at the worst possible moment. so always BACKUP your data.

you can also use dd, to copy the bit by bit image and then later use it to copy it over to the new drive. use man dd for more info. In this case, back up your data first.

As for Partimage having GRUB2, i don't think it would matter, since it uses grub2 only for the user to be able to boot into the system. I don't think it will allow you to install grub2. To install grub you will need the Arch live cd or a super grub disk.

Again, what you are planning to do is risky, so backup your data somewhere before trying.

EDIT : P.S: Did I mention, that you should backup your data?

Last edited by Inxsible (2010-08-11 11:53:58)

Arch Linux

#1 2010-08-11 10:52:36

Swapping internal HDD's on a dual-boot Arch & WinXP system

#2 2010-08-11 11:53:46

Re: Swapping internal HDD's on a dual-boot Arch & WinXP system

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