Upgrading Dual Boot System with Complications

[Derek Broughton]

drew einhorn wrote:

> Booted the system, arghh.  Grub errors, need to
> recreate a vanilla windows MBR defaulting to the
> C: drive, with the option of loading from the recovery
> partition instead.  Still have the old drive to copy
> stuff from.
> 
> Need to boot the recovery partition and reinstall
> a factory default XP in the C: partition.
> 
> The install a new Ubuntu.
> 
> If all else fails I can go back to a dd copy of the
> whole old drive to the new drive, but that will
> require hours.

For the life of me, I can't actually see a question in here...

If it can still actually boot off the old disk, I'd create a partition for
Windows, then boot off the OLD disk to restore Windows to the new disk,
then install Ubuntu (fresh), then copy my old /home/ to the new disk, and
probably never even bother to copy the restore partition off the old drive,
and finally remove and store the old drive in case you need that restore
partition again.

If booting from the old disk is now impossible, then I'd create the two
windows partitions, dd the restore partition to the new drive, and then
follow the steps above.

Of course, you have a few more things to copy off the old drive if you have
a lot of customizations - you probably want all of /etc/ at least.
-- 
derek