In Windows/Dos based utilities. Here's the story: I bought a nice new 400gb hd (it was cheap! only $100). I wanted to get it put in last night and start cloning from my old drive before going to sleep. I look through what I have to do that, and decide to give Norton Ghost (2003) a try. I attempt to make a bootable CD, but for some reason in 2003 Symantec didn't think to incorporate making a bootable CD into their software, they're still stuck on floppies. It just so happens that I have a floppy drive (amazing, sometimes I live in the last century like that). So I create the boot disks, then attempt to use Nero to create a bootable CD from the floppies (yes, it takes two because Ghost is too big to fit on one). From the time I created the disks till using Nero (all of 3 minutes) the data had become corrupted. Yay for floppies (granted mine are several years old... but still).

I finally manage to get the files I need on non-corrupted disks, and Nero makes me what it thinks will be a bootable CD, however this proves to not be the case. "No operating system found" it claims. Ok, so I try the floppies I have, no luck there either. Fine. Boot back to windows and fire up Ghost and tell it to clone the drive, it says "ok, i'm going to need to reboot... and i'm going to take X MB of disk space to do this". I think: ok, we're finally getting somewhere, and merrily click the OK button. The system shuts down and starts to boot back up. I watch in anticipation. "No operating system found." Huh? Maybe the wires are crossed on the drives (unlikely, but who knows). I unplug the new drive so I'm back to my "old" configuration. "No operating system found." Ummm... yes there is! I find some old partition magic disks and boot to those (those floppies still work... amazingly). "Bad partition table." No freakin way... Ghost screwed up my partition table when I asked it to clone the disk? I run the Kubuntu install/live CD. cfdisk reports the same thing. Ok, this sucks. Partition table's are not a think to be taken lightly.

I start searching "how to repair partition table after Ghost 2003 screws it up". This didn't yield much, so I widened it to "partition table repair". Ah, this handy tool call "gpart", which runs, you guessed it, in Linux. I just so happen to be running Linux right now! I grab the tool and toss it in /opt for safe keeping. gpart runs its scan and seems to find everything in approximately the right places and sizes per my recollection. Ok, write the table... it can't be any worse than what I have now. Rebooting yields poor results... Windows starts to load instead of Grub (set the wrong partition to be bootable). Windows blue screen's and immediately reboots, because obviously me, being a software engineer, would be too stupid to know what the blue screen means so it might as well hide it from me. Way to go Microsoft. I fix the bootable partition and Grub comes up, but won't load anything... but, its nice and lets me edit the parameters for the items in the list on the fly. I fix the partition number for Linux (apparently gpart numbered them differently) and I suddenly see myself staring at a Kubuntu boot screen!

This is good, I haven't lost everything. Sadly Windows is dead, so I try re-running gpart with the "-f" full scan feature. It finds the same partitions in the same places and writes the same table. Windows still doesn't work, and I still don't know why since the blue screen stays up just long enough for me to tell that it's a blue screen. Oh well, I still have a task to perform... copy the partitions to the new drive. In the process of finding "gpart", I also found the GNU Partition Editior (also known as "gparted" - can you guess how I managed to find it too?) It looks just like partition magic only free, and you can download (gasp) an ISO image to create a bootable CD (or whatever)! Okie dokie, I'm hoping this will work to copy partitions across disks. I load it up, and sure enough it does exactly what I want. I queue up all the copies (and make the partitions bigger while I'm at it... nobody likes running out of space). Kick it off and go to bed, well past due being 2am instead of the 11:30 I was hoping for.

It's morning now, and there's one minor problem left... I need to get Grub installed on the new drive's partition. Once that's done (thank you grub-install, and Kubuntu live CD), I'm off and running. Lots of re-configuration left, and I still need to try to tell Windows that it is in fact not dead, but at least it runs and I can enter this entry.

If you read all that, you must be really bored or be having the same problem and wondering how to fix it. Most importantly, just get gparted in the first place and you hopefully won't have any problems.