I'm running FC 9, and I have a laptop running XP with a dying hard drive. Trying DD command for copying dying drive to a new drive did not work. It would copy over the data, but then give me a string of I/O errors and the new drive then did nothing wheni tried to use it.

So I used Norton Ghost 2003 to clone the old drive to new partitions on the new drive. That was fine, but now I need to assign C: to the new drive's partition that has the operting system on it (the first partition is Dell Utilities (EISA format), the second is supposed to be C:, and the third is Dell Restore. I do not have install or rescue disks. having bought the laptop used).

Anyway, the new drive after Ghost either does not boot at all -- if I put the drive physically into the computer, taking out the dying disk -- giving "error loading operating system" or -- if I set it as the boot device and attach it to the computer via a USB cable -- it gets as far as displaying the initial Windows logo and then abruptly aborts back to the start of the BIOS.

So I'm thinking maybe I have to assign drive letter C: to the cloned disk to keep it from aborting or not loading. Trouble is, I cannot do that in Windows, since C: already exists in the original hard disk (and I don't want to change that) and one cannot use the same drive letter. Is there a linux technique I can use to get to the disk (which will be /dev/sda, and the partition /dev/sda2) and put in a C: tag so that when Windows starts off the disk, Windows won't abort?

Thanks,

Moxieman

Windows is what assigns the partitions as C:, D:, etc. I don't think there's anything for Linux that will do what you want. If the image was taken with Windows on the first partition of the original drive, when you've put it on the new drive it's still set up to think of itself as being on the first partition. I'm not sure how you'd be able to change that short of reinstalling Windows (and even that might not help, as Windows likes to be on the first partition).

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I ran fdisk on the original drive and the partition table definately shows the first partition as the Dell Utilities partition and the C: drive as the second partition. I also looked at the boot.ini on the old drive and it points to partition 2.

Thanks.

I'm 99% sure fdisk doesn't know anything about Windows drive letters. I don't think the partition table even contains that info - like Total said, it's Windows that decides on those. Do you mean fdisk showed the 2nd partition as bootable? You can certainly use fdisk or (easier) cfdisk to make a partition bootable, if that's what the problem is. If you're saying the output of fdisk actually included "C:" next to the partition, I take that all back, but I don't think that's possible.

I would guess it's never going to work via USB, because Windows is expecting to be on the primary master drive, but if it's plugged in internally it should work, so long as it was cloned ok and there weren't any errors due to problems with the original.