Re: Merge two small disks into one large

On 19 April 2010 18:30, Liam Proven <lproven@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 9:58 PM, Colin Law <clanlaw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 17 April 2010 21:22, Liam Proven <lproven@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 9:12 PM, Colin Law <clanlaw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi

I have two 40MB disks in a PC with XP and an ntfs share partition on
one and 9.10 on the other in a dual boot setup with grub2.

I am getting a larger disk and wish, if possible, to merge the data
from the two disks onto the new one.  I see how to clone the first one
using something like
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=64k
which I believe will copy the XP and data partitions to the new disk.
Should I then make a new partition on the new disk and copy the second
disk to it by
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc2  (or whatever the new partition is)?

My intended result is of course that I can then make the new disk the
boot device and my dual boot system should work as it did before.

Usually when I have such questions I am happy to experiment and learn
by my mistakes but I have not used dd and am a little nervous in the
face of it's potentially disastrous power.  My data will of course be
backed up but I do not particularly relish reinstalling XP since my
install disks are at least a couple of service packs behind.

I think you mean 40 *G*B, not MB. If you've installed anything much
newer than Windows 95 into 40 meg, I'll be impressed!

Yes, of course.  Showing my age I think.  My first PC did have a 10MB
hard disk and was the size of two CD drives.

:¬)

Boot off the Ubuntu install CD and use Gparted, it's *much* easier and
will do this for you. I recommend copying XP first, getting it
booting, then doing Ubuntu, as you are going to have to reinstall GRUB
afterwards.

When you say it is much easier, is there a fundamental flaw in my
suggested technique or is it just more complicated than I imagine?

DD is the hard way. You will have to manually make partitions and so
on. Why bother? Gparted is designed for this. Select, copy, go to new
disk, paste, repeat, click apply. It does all the work for you.

would like to understand the issues.  Also I don't see how to copy a
partition using gparted.

Copy is one of the main menu options!

I see that now, I don't know how I did not see it before. A case of
seeing what I thought I knew, I think.


  If I just copy the XP partition will it boot
at all?  I thought that by installing ubuntu and hence grub that I had
overwritten the boot bit of XP, though I am out of my comfort zone
here.

The way I'd do it, as I said:
 - copy XP
 - reboot
 - use XP boot CD to run CHKDSK, ensure it's OK, make it bootable

Unfortunately I now realise (following a comment in one of the
replies) that my whole plan is flawed anyway. The second stage of the
plan is to move to a new motherboard, and unfortunately, since Windows
is rubbish, that means I will have to re-install it anyway. I think I
may look at VirtualBox rather than a dual boot system since I only
need Windows for a couple of legacy apps anyway.

Many thanks for the suggestions from all, I have learnt a lot.

Colin

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