Problems starting Ubuntu after cloning with Ghost 8.2 (fsck complains)

ToniCipriani · 10-21-2007, 12:31 PM

I've had Feisty dual booting with Windows on my laptop, so I decided to move to Gutsy now. Now what I want to do instead though, is have my Windows XP move to a VirtualBox VM that runs on top of Gutsy.

What I did, is plug a new hard drive that I borrowed from work, a Hitachi 40GB. I have a Toshiba 40GB myself. I backed up my hard drive using Ghost, and start fresh with the borrowed drive. Installed Gutsy, got the VM working (with a lot of fiddling around with the VM), on the borrowed drive. Now I have to clone the system back from the borrowed drive onto my own drive, but it seems that Ghost resized my partition a slight bit, since the size was a bit smaller in my 40GB drive. After I cloned it, GRUB refused to work, but that was an easy fix. But then fsck also said my drive is screwed up, so it says it wants to fix my drive, but it seems to make it worse. It just has a whole bunch of errors about innodes in wrong places, like a zillion of them. So I reran it with fsck -y, and now I couldn't even mount or boot the drive.

What should I do to get the system back onto my own drive properly? I only have the laptop running Linux. My desktop runs Windows (although I do have an Ubuntu VM) so dd won't work.

Lenard · 10-21-2007, 02:51 PM

Try again this time use gprated to handle fixing/creating partitions and for copying the contents of the partitions (one at a time) from one drive. The utility gparted can be found in many 'live' Linux CD including;

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

ToniCipriani · 10-21-2007, 05:30 PM

Works like a charm.

I used the Ubuntu desktop disc, it already has gparted. Connected the source drive, go into gparted, make sure everything's unmounted then just copy away.

Thanks!

Lenard · 10-21-2007, 07:38 PM

Glad to hear you got the system transferred and working. Remember to use gparted in the future instead of ghost which does not support many Linux partitions very well.