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And finally, I upgraded my hard drive (part 2)

And so the story continues. After much difficulty installing / setting up my new hard drive, I decided to make matters worse by cloning my old Windows XP partition to one of the partitions on the new drive. After a small amount of research, I came across ntfsclone part of the ntfsprogs package. As quick as you can say “apt-get install” I had it installed and was toying around with it. My biggest concern was that I was coping a 400GB drive to a 500GB drive. I was able to clone my drive and boot it up successfully, albeit it was only reporting 400GB. Wait a second, where did my Vista bootloader go? Shit, lost it again. Before I addressed that issue, I went ahead and resolved my 400GB drive issue. Luckily, there was another application named ntfsresize that fixed me right up.

Okay, so now I’m at the point where I have successfully cloned my XP drive, but Vista was lost because of the missing bootloader. I went through the motions of running the restore bootloader from the installation disc... 5 times. Yes, 5 times, because after Googling around a bit, I found that the restore doesn’t work all of the time, in fact it’s very common for it to take multiple attempts before it works. “WOW”, is all I can say about that. Now the repair did finally work, only now I could only boot into Vista, and no option for XP. Fed up, I went searching for an application to fix the glitch. Said application was Vista Boot Pro, which was well worth the $9.95 to fix my situation. The program worked first time and allowed me to add Vista and XP to the bootloader with the labels that I wanted. I’ve yet to find an open source alternative so that may end up being a project of mine in the near future.