Cloned a laptop[msi-gsx700] hdd from 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm drive using acronis 2009 clone tool.Both hdds 250GB. sda1=xp;sda2=vista;sda3=ubuntu64-8.10;sda8=swap;sda6=/slack 12.2;sda7=slack /home. several other partitions ntfs + fat.
Xp & vista both boot with no problems using Easy bcd from vista,though boot files are on xp partition.
Ubuntu & slack refuse to boot.All files seem to be in order viewed from puppy live cd.
fsck sees all partitions, oddly except sda2[vista] maybe because when in xp ,xp=C;\...when in vista vista=C:\ ie their drive letters seen from windows swap around, depending which you boot into.
fsck sees sda3 ext3 0x83.
Error on trying to boot into either linux
"Bootpart 2.60 Bootsector (c) 1993-2005 etc.
Loading new partition
Bootsector from c.h.hockstatter
Cannot load from harddisk
Insert system disc & press any key. PXE-EC8. !PXE structure not found in UNDI driver code segment. PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM"
Grub disc 'find'command can't find menu.1st or vmlinuz or stage 1 on the disk.error 15
Ran e2fsck -v on sda3 &sda6 & found timestamps set in the future & it repaired them.
Tried to chroot into / at sda3 with no luck, to repair grub on root partitions.
Any ideas would be welcome.

You need to somehow restore the windows bootloader from the looks of it. I'm not sure how that would work, I'm not expert, but oyu could try installing GRUB then chainloading...
Alternately, if your files are intact, back them up, wipe your harddriv and start from scratch. ONLY AS A LAST RESORT!!!!

The windows boot loader seems to work ok. Super grub disc is reporting the errors from grub. I found that giving 'UUID' command in grub returned nothing....it can't find vmlinuz or initrd etc. cylinders & blocks numbers match on both drives from fsck -v.

i've done this with success on usb drives and fedora live:
perhaps you can do:
do not get sda and sdb confused:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ommand-362506/

How are you trying to boot Slackware and Ubuntu? You indicate you boot xp and vista using EasyBCD, do you have entries in the windows files (BCDEdit?) for Ubuntu and/or Slackware? Is there some way to chainload using EasyBCD. I would assume that you have the windows bootloader in the mbr?

If you are getting file not found error from the Grub prompt something went wrong.

My best-guess would be that the Master Boot Record (MBR) has not been copied. This is a critical block of information that the BIOS reads when booting from a volume in order to locate the boot-loader ... be it LILO or Grub.

If the MBR is missing or corrupt, the BIOS will be "unable to find a bootable drive."

The solution is... to rewrite the MBR. Unfortunately, the answer to "how do I do that?" is ... "it depends."

Have no fear: your data is (probably...) quite safe. Just "a minor technical difficulty. Do not adjust your TV set..."

thanyou all for your input,I returned to my puzzle with puppy & ran fdisk -l on the partitions in limbo & was told "doesn't contain a valid partition table" so I guess this to be the root of the problem. All the linux partitions have grub or lilo on their / partition, which booted fine with Easy BCD before cloning..Ran e2fsck -CO -p -f -v /dev/sda* which returned "1901 non contiguous inodes"[#ind/tind/dind/blocks 9247/99/0] Yes data is safe as I can read/write to partitions no worries. Just trying to save a great setup .

OK--Solved.Thankyou all for your input.
Used dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=1024
this worked though dd ran an error[I/O write] at~160GB into transfer..this covered xp@sda1-75GB vista@sda4-50GB. Used watch to view progress from another post here[*@# watch -n10 kill -USR1 (PID number of dd)].
This must have repaired the missmatched block numbers returned by fdisk -l on the 2 drives.
Used dd & watch to reclone slax & ubuntu64 on other partitions.
Probably I took the long route to this puzzle but have learned heaps,fdisk,e2fsck,CLI is not my strength...DEFINITELY will only use dd from now.dd_rescue may have been better but not familiar to me...yet.