Best way to correct Hard drive clone gone wrong
 

This is my first post. What a disaster.

I had a 80G hard drive split with Kubuntu 11.04 and Win XP 64.

I needed more space.

a. I added in a spare 250G HD drive.
b. Used Seagate clone tool to clone entire drive.
c. Disconnected 80G drive.
d. Reboot and received Grub rescue prompt.
e. Tried a few articles to fix grub but no success.
e. Reconnected 80G drive and disconnected 250G drive.
f. Booted using original drive.

I should have stopped there. It was late and I was tired. I decided to wipe the 250G drive and do a fresh install.

a. Oops, I deleted the linux swap partitions off the 80G instead of the 250G.
b. Realised my mistake but it was too late, so I recreated the swap partitions.
c. Rebooted and back to GRUB rescue prompt on reboot.

I didn't want to lose the data on the original drive, so I did a fresh install of Natty on the 250G from DVD.

So I can access my data (now backed up). But I can't disconnect either drive without getting the GRUB rescue prompt.

Optimally, I only want one drive in the machine (250G). I have two copies of Natty (one highly customised the way I like 80G), a cloned copy of NAtty from 80G on the 250G and the fresh one on the 250G. Independent partitions of Win XP 64 also exist on each drive.

Can I have some advice on the best way forward?

The simpliest choice seems to do a wipe on each drive and entire fresh install.

But I have extremely limited broadband and want to retain both drives but in independent PC's. Having to download all the apps and customise them again is undesirable (and expensive). Additionally, I'll have to re-install Windows XP 64 as well, but I can live with that. I don't want to lose Kubuntu.

Is there some way to recover the way each drive menu boots? I want one set of bootable menus on each drive - Linux, linux recovery and Win XP 64, Memtest?

I realise that some of you would shake your heads at the above but I'm still a noob with Linux.

The best starting point would be to provide more detailed information on your drives/partitions. You can go to the site below and download the bootinfoscript and run it. I'm not sure if you can boot anything now??. Read the instructions.

http://bootinfoscript.sourceforge.net/

No harm in fsck'ing up if you still have (all) your data. Great way to learn.
Get the data yancek asked for, but the probable reason you need both disks installed to boot is that the (latest) install took the default to install to the MBR of the first (80 Gig) disk. Can be rectified fairly easily.

Results from Boot Info Script
 

Results in attachment:

Also two screenshots of KDE Partition. I'm a visual sort until I get the handle on command line.

Hmmmm - let's see what the BIOS thinks. Re-boot and hit escape at the boot menu. Then "c" to get into command prompt (as it says at the bottom).Then "ls" (no quotes), and post the output; you'll need to write it down by hand.
A couple of <Esc> should get you back to the menu.

Output:

(hd0) (hd0,msdos7) (hd0,msdos6) (hd0,msdos5) (hd0,msdos1)
(hd1) (hd1,msdos9) (hd1,msdos8) (hd1,msdos7) (hd1,msdos6) (hd1, msdos5) (hd1,msdos1)
(hd2) (hd2,msdos1) (fd0)

Thinking (hd2)is USB pendrive I left plugged in hub.

Is that one (E)IDE and one SATA drive by any chance ?. Debian/Ubuntu don't seem to handle that very well in the initscripts.

If it was me, I'd pull the 80 Gig out, boot the Ubuntu liveCD and chroot into your preferred copy of Ubuntu on the hard disk. Then re-install grub properly to the MBR of the 250 Gig drive. Have a read of this - go to the "Reinstalling grub2" section. I prefer chroot, but that GUI tool might work, haven't seen it.