Merge two small disks into one large

[Lucio M Nicolosi]

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On 04/17/2010 05:22 PM, Liam Proven 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.
>>

> 
> 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.
> 

Indeed, copying partitions with Gparted is very easy, and in your case
the original partitions will remain in your old HDs as backups, at least
for a while.

If you intend to keep using your old HDs, perhaps you could create a
couple of partitions in one of them to host the Windows swap file and
the Linux swap partition, or even leave the Win partition where it is
today, just resizing it to fit your needs, 40 Gig is not so little for
Win sys.

Although I've moved VirtualBox Windows partitions (in fact files) from
here to there with not an issue to report, I imagine that a moving a
real Win partition would turn it unbootable and I'm wondering about the
procedures to make it bootable again w/out reinstalling the whole system.

Could you please Colin, report your steps?


- -- 
L M Nicolosi, Eng.
Lat.: 23°34'4.79"S - Long.: 46°39'59.53"W
Linux Regist. User #481505 - http://counter.li.org/
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