Merge two small disks into one large

[Luis Paulo]

May I suggest you leaving things as they are on the old disks,
And install a new, fresh, sparkling, linux on the new disk?

You will be able to boot to the new system or to any of the older. Grub will
do that automatically for you, right?
And you'll be able to access data of the old systems from the new.

Leave some free space. After you may copy your XP to the new disk, really
don't see why, can't help you there :),  or just create a NTFS partition
that XP may use to store your data.

Just another thought. If you eventually free the old disks, remember they
are still good to do raid. 0, 1 or both, storing what, it depends on their
condition and speeds.

Regards

On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 9:58 PM, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:

> On 17 April 2010 21:22, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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!
>
> 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?  I
> would like to understand the issues.  Also I don't see how to copy a
> partition using gparted.  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.
>
> My plan was to boot off the live CD to do whatever I have to do,
> though I did not mention that.
>
> >
> > 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.
>
> Understood, thanks.
>
> Colin
>
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