<div dir="ltr">Hi, Have an old laptop that needs upgrading. Hard drive was reporting some errors, so I bought a new one. I was surprised that the exact same manufacturer/model drive was the most economical option, as well as the most convenient. The laptop did not come with XP install cds. There is a 7.5 GB recovery partition at the end of the drive. Which has to be preserved. It is base on an older vintage of MS Windows. Dual boot Ubuntu (I forget the exact vintage) and Windows XP. It was built in the days before ntfs-ng was stable so the partitioning was extra complex. I shrank the XP c: ntfs partition to make room for the Ubuntu install. Added partions for /boot, swap, /, and a fat32 filesystem to hold the shared data. Have an ide to usb adapter, pulled the flakey drive, installed the new drive in the laptop. Hung the old drive on the usb adapter. Could not figure out the incantations for creating the exact partition table, so I (slowly) copied the old drive to the new using: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hda conv=noerror to avoid hanging on the flakey sectors. Took a few hours. Used a gparted livecd to check and repair all the filesystems. Put a spare drive in the ide to usb adapter and copied the data partion for safe keeping using gparted. Deleted all the crufty old partions, expanded the ntfs C: partition leaving an empty space between the C: partition and the "recovery" partition, to either install Hardy or Intrepid. Booted the system, arghh. Grub errors, need to recreate a vanilla windows MBR defaulting to the C: drive, with the option of loading from the recovery partition instead. Still have the old drive to copy stuff from. Need to boot the recovery partition and reinstall a factory default XP in the C: partition. The install a new Ubuntu. If all else fails I can go back to a dd copy of the whole old drive to the new drive, but that will require hours. -- Drew Einhorn </div>