OT (IT): Help me, I've got NFI

OK here's the background. Dell Inspiron 510m laptop, 40 gig hdd almost
full to bursting. I bought a new 160 gig drive and an external usb
enclosure. Following advice on here I downloaded Acronis True Image
and set about using it - sort of.

Oh hang on, something else happened. I had written to Dell customer
services to ask if there was a limit to the hdd size I could use - no
answer. Phoned them up and they said the bios would recognise 160 but
they could only sell me 80 gig (for over a ton!). After I bought the
hdd I then got a reply to my email telling me that the max usable size
was 80 gig. So I thought I'd have a play with the drive (Ididn't have
the enclosure at this point) and tried installing Mandrake 10.1 on it.
That seemed to install ok then failed - I think because it didn't
recognise the video gear. Anyway, back to the story.

I was looking for a button that said "clone" but their wasn't one -
just image. Using the XP disk management I tried to more or less set
up the same partitions on the new disk as the old one - a fat16 of
55mb, a fat32 of 3.49gb and an ntfs of 33.7gb. I figured one of the
FATs was probably the Dell diagnostics and had no idea what the other
was. I couldn't fit the image of the NTFS anywhere else so I made
another partition to store stuff on. Then I imaged the 3 partitions
onto the stuff disk and restored the images onto the equivalent
partitions on the new drive.

This seemed all well and good until I swapped the drives over. As I
turned it on it booted to Mandrake giving me 2 choices - Linux or
failsafe, both of which get as far as "kernel panic: No init found.
Try passing init= option to kernel" although there are lots of other
errors en route.

My question is, since the ntfs image of my old c-drive is marked as
the boot partition and the old hard drive (from whence the image came)
was never touched by linux, why is it booting to Mandrake? More
importantly, can I stop it?

 

:

<snip>

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?BB-A422A

 

Ha. I usually enjoy your posts - funny buggerer. At least it's in my
price range.

 

I tailor my output to the audience

I originally typed "don't be such a fucking pikey" but I knew you would get
it from the URL

Now, please excuse me whilst I go back to recalibrating Lozzo

 

I wish you well with that. I'll go away and see if I can do something
with a Windows XP disk and fixmbr or summat. Whisky first.

 

--
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Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright (Remove rust to reply)
116 Giulietta 3.0l Sprint 1.7 145 2.0 Cloverleaf 156 V6 2.5 S2
Triumph Sprint ST 1050: It's blue, see.
www.cuore-sportivo.co.uk

 

Well, it's obviously attempting to boot into Mandrake if it's there or
not which would suggest that the boot sector/mbr hasn't been overwritten
and still points to the Mandrake boot loader.

 

the man with no idea wrote:
[snip]
If I'm reading this right, you tried to make it too complicated.

You need to image the entire disk so the MBR etc gets copied as well,
and there shouldn't be any need to touch the XP disk managment tools-
just tell trueimage to copy and resize proportionately.



Can you use an external drive to hold the image?

 

The only external drive I have with enough space is the 160 gb target
drive. Also, restoring the image doesn't seem to have affected the mbr
- or is that cos I was doing one partition at a time?

 

Yes, I think. Do it "all or nothing".

--
Ivan Reid, School of Engineering & Design, _____________ CMS Collaboration,
Brunel University. Ivan.Reid@[brunel.ac.uk|cern.ch] Room 40-1-B12, CERN
GSX600F, RG250WD "You Porsche. Me pass!" DoD #484 JKLO#003, 005
WP7# 3000 LC Unit #2368 (tinlc) UKMC#00009 BOTAFOT#16 UKRMMA#7 (Hon)
KotPT -- "for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty".

 

<boggle>
I've obviously missed too many threads lately!
</b>

--
Ivan Reid, School of Engineering & Design, _____________ CMS Collaboration,
Brunel University. Ivan.Reid@[brunel.ac.uk|cern.ch] Room 40-1-B12, CERN
GSX600F, RG250WD "You Porsche. Me pass!" DoD #484 JKLO#003, 005
WP7# 3000 LC Unit #2368 (tinlc) UKMC#00009 BOTAFOT#16 UKRMMA#7 (Hon)
KotPT -- "for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty".

 

Yep.

You need to find another disk to hold the image of the entire disk, or
find a PC you can attach both disk to temporarily.

 

Yes, that may work.

 

Well yeah, anyone can say that.