Hard Drive upgrade - proper procedure for backup?
 

Hello All,

I have a Dell laptop that I'm running Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) and XP on. GRUB is loaded on the MBR as a bootmanager. I tried upgrading the hard drive by first imaging the drive with Ghost 7 (yes, I know, it's old) and then restoring that image to the new drive. When I go to boot using the new drive, the word "GRUB" scrolls across the entire screen and the machine doesn't boot.

I've tried some of the fixes suggested by members of ubuntuforums.org but none of them have worked. So, I've pretty much scrapped the idea of being able to accomplish this using a drive imaging program.

As a network admin of a Windows network, I'm accustomed to this procedure to clone a hard drive. I understand that it's not necessary when you're running Linux. So, I guess my question is - what is the correct procedure to get an *EXACT CLONE* of a hard disk from one physical drive to another? I'm not worried about resizing the partitions, just want to move the operating system and data from one drive to another without having to worry about losing my bootmanager (or anything else for that matter).

Also, please note that we're talking about a laptop here, so hooking up two drives simultaneously is not possible (or at least not easily done without purchasing an external enclosure for one of the drives).

One member actually suggested that I just reinstall Ubuntu - I thought not having to do a reinstall to fix an OS was one of Linux's strong suits! :confused:

TIA for any advice you might have.

The only thing I can think of to try is to use a live CD to reinstall grub to the mbr of the new drive.

Since all the data should have been copied correctly, this should let you restore grub from your /boot partition. I think you want to use B4 or B5 from this tutorial.

Thanks for the feedback. Ultimately, I think I solved my own problem. I took my laptop home and instead of using my company's copy of ghost to backup and restore to the new drive, I instead used my own personal copy of Acronis TrueImage 8 and it worked beautifully.