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.
