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ciphergothIt seems like the hard drive in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ergotia and lilithmagna's ageing Dell PC might be dying; it keeps refusing to boot from it. I've bought them a new hard drive which is 1 TB instead of 160 GB; what I'm trying to work out is the best way of transferring the system on to it.
The old drive has four partitions: one big one and three little ones. I've taken byte-for-byte images of all four. So what I think I want to do is this:
* duplicate the partition structure of the old drive onto the new, with all the extra space left after the biggest partition
* Copy the partitions in
* [the tricky bit, read on]
* Boot from the new hard drive and let Windows repair the partitions which were not shut down cleanly
* Boot from gparted, and make the biggest partition take up all the available space
* Boot back into Windows and hope it doesn't complain
The tricky bit is, how should I sort out the boot partition? Should I copy over the MBR from the old drive, and if so how? I'm using Linux to do the copying, so something starting "dd if=..." would be perfect. Or is there some other way I should be going about this?
One other weird thing is that SMART reports that the drive is perfectly healthy, which means I'm worrying that the problem might be elsewhere, but I can't think where.
Thanks!
ergotia and lilithmagna's ageing Dell PC might be dying; it keeps refusing to boot from it. I've bought them a new hard drive which is 1 TB instead of 160 GB; what I'm trying to work out is the best way of transferring the system on to it. The old drive has four partitions: one big one and three little ones. I've taken byte-for-byte images of all four. So what I think I want to do is this:
* duplicate the partition structure of the old drive onto the new, with all the extra space left after the biggest partition
* Copy the partitions in
* [the tricky bit, read on]
* Boot from the new hard drive and let Windows repair the partitions which were not shut down cleanly
* Boot from gparted, and make the biggest partition take up all the available space
* Boot back into Windows and hope it doesn't complain
The tricky bit is, how should I sort out the boot partition? Should I copy over the MBR from the old drive, and if so how? I'm using Linux to do the copying, so something starting "dd if=..." would be perfect. Or is there some other way I should be going about this?
One other weird thing is that SMART reports that the drive is perfectly healthy, which means I'm worrying that the problem might be elsewhere, but I can't think where.
Thanks!
