[oclug] Upgrading a windows box with linux

[Jon Earle]

Using disk imaging such as Ghost, image the PC's disk to a network drive,
zip drive, hard drive on a parallel port, etc, replace the HD, and restore
the image.  Easiest, fastest (you'll likely be finished the exercise in
30min or so) and most foolproof way to do it.

If you _really_ want to mess around in Linux to do this (I wouldn't
recommend it, given the good tools that exist for doing just this task),
then the question of how to make the new disk bootable depends on the
flavour of Windows, which you've not told us.  Windows NT requires you to
use the install floppies/CD to initiate a repair session, where you
replace the boot environment.  Windows 9x just requires a boot floppy and
a "fdisk /mbr" command.  The partition would have to be bootable under
Win9x and I would guess the same for NT.  You'd want to make the
partitions in the DOS/Windows environment, and it wouldn't hurt to "format
/s" the new partition (so you can verify that the new disk can boot on its
own before you do any data tranfer).

Cheers!
Jon

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Contact HUB Computer Consulting, 888-353-7272 / 613-830-1499 to obtain
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On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Martin Hicks wrote:

>
> I have to upgrade a windows-only machine from a 3GB disk to something much
> larger.  This is a production machine so I figured I'd use linux to do the
> file copying and stuff.  I'm going to:
>
> 1) stick the new disk in as /dev/hdc
> 2) format the disk vfat
> 3) copy all the data from /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdc1
> 4) move the hdc disk to the hda position
>
> My question is:
>
> How do I make my new disk windows bootable?  Does anyone remember this?
> Do I just have to toggle the bootable flag in fdisk?
>
> I guess I *could* just install lilo or grub in the mbr, but I'd rather not.
>
> thanks
> mh
>
> --
> Martin Hicks  ||  mort at bork.org  || PGP/GnuPG: 0x4C7F2BEE
> plato up 13 days, 23:16, 13 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
> Beer: So much more than just a breakfast drink.
>

---
Jon Earle

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