Michael J. Semaniuk wrote: >> I would like to copy a Windows 2000 Professional (Service Pack 4) hard >> disk with this partition arrangement (as listed by diskmgmt.msc): >> >> Drive letter C: is listed as a healthy SYSTEM partition, type FAT, and >> is 502 Mb in length >> Drive letter D: is listed as the BOOT partiton, type NTFS, and is 4.54 >> Gb in length >> Drive letter E: is listed as a healthy partition, type FAT, and is 996 >> Mb in length >> >> I want to copy this to a brand new Western Digital WD400JB (40 Gb) hard >> drive. I've already tried their "Data Lifeguard Tools" version 11.2 and >> cannot get the new drive to boot because the software doesn't understand >> this unusual source disk arrangement. I need to boot from Drive D:. > > g4u will do this for you without a problem. It's a sector by sector > copy, so you'll be able to pull the old drive and place the new drive > as the master (assuming IDE) and life will be good. > >> I would also like to copy from the source drive, to the target drive, >> but expand the target drive's partitions so that all 3 partitions are >> equally sized (roughly 12 gb each * 3 partitons is about the true size >> of the target drive. > > You'll need to go third party for this piece. Once g4u copies the > drive, you can utilize commercial ware like Partition Magic or open > source with something like qtparted on the Knoppix Live CD. Here's a > URL that talks a bit about the latter. > > http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-do-i-resize-windows-partition-with-open-source-software.html > > > > Here's a link to Knoppix as well. > > http://knoppix.net/ > > Hope this helps. > > -Mike > > > Thank you, Mike. I also got a reply from another person off-list who suggested I use gparted. I had a very long day of working with this drive cloning project. I'm actually doing it for a friend (which is important as we will see.) The 'g4u' part was easy -- it cloned the smaller disk to the larger one for me with just a single command. The 'gparted' part, where I attempted to resize partitions, was really difficult for me and in the end I cloned the source disk to the new disk twice and resized twice with gparted before I succeeded. I used the gparted 0.3.3 livecd downloaded from sourceforge.
My first attempt to resize the clone hard disk with gparted took a long time, over an hour. I had fat16, ntfs, fat16, and unallocated space to work with. It was not clear how to move and resize a partition even after reading the gparted HTML documentation. Yes, I did read the documentation. I couldn't understand why clicking on the final fat16 partition, then clicking "move/resize", wouldn't let me grow the partition into the unallocated space and I couldn't seem to move it to the right (past the unallocated space) either. I kept trying and then clearing pending operations. Finally I copied the fat16 partition and pasted it into the unallocated space. This seemed to work! I could move it to the end of the drive, too. Then I could delete the original partition. I did the same with the ntfs partition: copy it, paste it into the unallocated space, and grow it. Delete the original partition. The resizing and moving done this way happened very slowly, but it seemed to work. Finally I did this with the first fat16 partition. A funny thing happened though...somehow the copies of the original fat16 partitions were formatted as fat32. But all seemed well. I rebooted the machine and to my dismay a message came up, 'ntldr missing. Press ctrl-alt-del to restart.' I restarted the computer with the gparted CD to check things, and then I noticed the 'manage flags' item in (I think) the Tools menu. I selected the NTFS partition and checked the box for 'boot' in this menu. But it didn't help when I rebooted the computer. I started researching the message on the Microsoft Knowledgebase and realized I could use Recovery Console to check whether the files ntldr, boot.ini and ntdetect.com were on the boot drive. I could also use 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr'. So I whipped out my Windows 2000 CD and booted to it. That is when I discovered that Recovery Console expects you to provide the Administrator password, and I didn't know it. My friend was away for the day, so it was back to the original hard drive and a fresh cloning operation with g4u. This time when g4u completed, I booted the freshly cloned drive to Windows 2000, changed the Administrator password, and made an Windows 2000 Emergency Repair Disk. I also had the good sense to copy boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com to the floppy disk. My second attempt to work with gparted was easier. I again 'copied' and 'pasted' partitions into unallocated space, but this time I only copied the last fat16 partition, deleted the original, then copied the NTFS partition, grew it to 30 Gb, and deleted the original NTFS partition. I left the first fat16 partition intact. Perhaps my method wasn't the best way to use gparted. I also turned on the boot flag for the new NTFS partition. When I rebooted, I got the same error message -- 'ntldr missing'. This time, I was able to log into Windows 2000 recovery console, and I used the map command to find out which partitions Windows thinks I had. The boot partition was "HardDisk(0)Partition(3)' and I noticed that boot.ini was pointing at partition(2). I edited that '2' to a '3', ran 'fixboot c:', ran 'fixmbr', and rebooted. This time, Windows 2000 booted! So I've learned valuable lessons, perhaps a little too slowly. And hopefully, gparted will continue to improve its user interface. 'g4u' now has one more user. It just works! Thanks for the tips and I hope this long narrative will help someone else and save them some time. Bob Cochran ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier. Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ g4u-help mailing list g4u-help@feyrer.de https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/g4u-help
