Merge two small disks into one large

[Liam Proven]

On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 9:12 PM, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> 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!

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.

Note, you can only have 4 primary partitions on a single PC hard disk.
The /recommended/ "standard" config is one primary, one extended & all
the others as logicals in that. I'd make your XP C: drive the primary
& all the others logicals, if I were you.

Afterwards, your Ubuntu root FS - assuming it's the 1st in the
extended partition - will be /dev/hda5 or /dsev/sda5.


-- 
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