[SOLVED] Transfer LL from laptop to desktop w/ win7 sp1 (side-by-side)

[gold_finger]

Besides, you have a reputation to uphold - everything you touch is supposed to turn to gold. Touch this project ! :-)

Well, I don't know about that -- doesn't seem to be working here ... yet. 

I'm wondering if there's really something screwy about the aftermarket install of Win7 on the desktop.... Other people with Win7 don't have to jump through these hoops - do they?

No, this kind of problem is rare.  Most of the time a dual-boot installation is relatively simple.

I was curious about the WARNING in the command response to Fixparts....

Actually, I'm glad you brought that up again.  I ignored it before because was focused on what should have showed up but didn't.  So I looked up info on partitions marked as 0xEE to see what that meant and came across this page:  http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/hybrid.html.  It's written by same guy who wrote the FixParts program -- who is an expert on partitioning related stuff and much of what I've learned came from his writings.

In a nutshell, it looks like you've got what's called a "Hybrid MBR" on your disk.  I'm not even going to try explaining what that means because I don't have full grasp of it myself.  (Read the link for yourself and you'll see why I say that.)  Basically it sounds like a rats nest and somehow your Windows installation was created with that instead of a normal MBR.  That is causing the problem of GParted not seeing the partitions.

Before proceeding:

• Make sure your backups are good and that you can access the files.
  
• Make sure you have a Windows install/recovery disk handy.
  

What you want is a normal MBR on that drive.  Very, very long-shot idea that may work:  use your Windows install/restore disk to fix the MBR.  My thinking is that maybe if you run the commands to redo the MBR, that might create a normal MBR itself.  If it works, then you'll have saved yourself many hours of work.  So here's a link describing how to do that:  http://www.tomshardware.com/news/win7-wi...10036.html.

If that didn't work then I'm going to outline two other possibilities.  Both of them will require that you wipe out the disk and make a new (normal) MBR to start with.  That can be done with GParted from your live LL disk.  In GParted, just go to Device -> Create Partitition Table -> "msdos" -> OK.  That will make a new MBR/(msdos) partition table and Windows will be gone.  Then ...

Option 1:  try copying cloned partitions back to the drive.  (Completely unsure if this will work.)

I'm not very familiar with Redo Backup, but if you created a clone of the drive I'm worried that you may not be able to use that to clone back on to the original drive because it might clone back the hybrid MBR with it.  If you can just clone back each partition separately (instead of whole disk at once), then that might not happen.  In that scenario, it might work as an easy way to get your system setup quickly, but you'll need to run a Win 7 install/restore disk to put the boot loader back on the disk.  Worst case scenario is that you can't copy the cloned partitions, but you can at least copy back any files you need from them to a new installation of Windows (option 2).

Option 2:  Reinstall Windows from scratch, then install Linux Lite.  (This will work.)

This will work, but it reinstalling Windows and your programs will take a loooong time.

Once you've wiped out the drive by creating a new MBR partition table, use GParted to create one NTFS partition on the drive and make it the size that you want Windows to be.  Leave rest of disk unused, unpartitioned.

Close out of live LL and reboot computer with Windows install disk.  Direct installation to that one NTFS partition.  (Windows will automatically create any other partitions it needs -- probably one small system related partition.)

After the install completes, I'd recommend you DO NOT bother installing Windows updates or any additional programs for right now.  If for some reason you run into the same problem, you want to find that out before you waste more HOURS with updates and program installs to Windows.

Now boot with live LL disk and open GParted.  If you see the Windows partitions, breath a sigh of relief and go ahead with your installation.  You can pick "Along side Windows" and it will automatically make a Root and Swap partition for you in the unused space.  Or, if you pick "Something else", you can make the partitions yourself.

If all that worked, you should now have a dual-boot system.  Now is the time to go ahead and do your Windows updates, install addition programs to it, copy your backed-up files on to it, etc.

Good luck.

[ukbrian]

Redo Backup, qt4-fsarchiver and Macrium Reflect all copy the MBR, does Clonzilla?

Maybe clone the windows partitions to the USB drive with gparted, sort out the MBR for the bad drive and then clone back again and run the Win 7 install/restore disk.?

[gold_finger]

Redo Backup, qt4-fsarchiver and Macrium Reflect all copy the MBR, does Clonzilla?

Maybe clone the windows partitions to the USB drive with gparted, sort out the MBR for the bad drive and then clone back again and run the Win 7 install/restore disk.?

Using GParted is a good idea too.  I always forget about that.  Thanks for the reminder ukbrian.

@ukbrian,

Do you happen to know if the Redo Backup is just a complete clone of the drive?  If it is then tripple aught could keep that and just use GParted to copy/paste the backed up partitions and not restore the MBR from the backup.  Then use Windows restore disk to get booting restored.  Then install LL.

[ukbrian]

Do you happen to know if the Redo Backup is just a complete clone of the drive?

I've never used it but my understanding is that it is and would make a good fall back

I found restoring clonzilla much to complicated for my little brain but might be the solution as tripple aught is more capable than I.

I have used Reflect for my windows backups for many years, I'm looking at the "Direct disk cloning" on this page as the free version does this. http://www.macrium.com/pages/features.aspx

I'll clone my win install on a SSD drive to an external USB and see what happens.

I have never had a need to use USB's as I use RW DVD's but out of curiosity I used saline to clone a running LL install to a ntfs USB writing the MBR to the drive.

It booted into the USB and the install was persistent and I was able to clone LL onto another HDD.

I'm off to try cloning my windows now but I'm a slow methodical guy so don't rush me.

edit
Using Reflect I cloned win7 to a external USB drive, set the bios to boot off it and it failed, rebooted into my usual OS, run update-grub rebooted and it appeared in the menu but failed to boot. I don't have an official win7 CD so I can't try to restore the windows MBR.

I don't see any logical reason why Redo do would fail, it's only copying files and the MBR not doing anything with the partition table so I'll try next with Redo.

edit
I've created the backup file 22 GB, clicked on restore and it's asking for my source drive? not my backup file, very strange and my data partition doesn't seem to be listed.

I'm copying the backup folder onto a USB stick to see if that gets listed.

Any experienced redo users about?

edit
Well I managed to find my backup files on the USB stick and started the reinstall but at 60% it erred with a crc error or something so I'm trying on a second machine now

[gold_finger]

Thanks for running the tests.  Don't know why Windows wouldn't boot.  If original install was OEM version, maybe it will only boot from an internal disk due to restricted MS license built-in to it?  (Just a guess.)

Any chance you can post GParted screenshots of the USB drive you made the Macrium (or Redo, or both) clone to?

[ukbrian]

I just ran redo on a second machine and successfully backed up win7 to a USB stick and then restored it to a sata drive in one of these type things http://www.cclonline.com/product/74499/2...r/HDD3071/

I rebooted with an F12, selected the new drive and got a grub error because I'd written grub to the original drive so I booted into my primary linux partition done a "sudo update-grub", rebooted and got 2 windows options one on sda1 and one on sdb1.

Both were bootable but now I have the problem of 2 win7's cluttering up my grub menu! I hardly ever use windows.

I found the redo installer very unintuitive! I'll do it again and take some screen shots or do a video.

I might try again on machine one as win7 is on a 40GB drive there with an untouched windows MBR so should boot off F12

PS

Don't know why Windows wouldn't boot

I think it error because of the backup file whichI'd copied from my data partitio to a USB

[ukbrian]

Redo has a good set of utilities but lacks a screen shooter, I pressed PrintScreen and got a message "no gnome-screenshot installed" so I tried to install and failed from the terminal, no network conection I think so I'll try a different way later.

[ukbrian]

I've now found that at sometime I have written to the MBR with windows so I'm doing a fresh win7 install to make sure redo copies the MBR correctly.

LOL
I just installed win7 to the wrong drive!
I installed on a 250 GB and then done a backup and tried to install the backup on a 160 GB drive, epic fail.

It must be 3 years since I done a windows install, luckily I don't have to do the updates because that's the time bandit.

I forgive myself.

[ukbrian]

Success with the new windows install and MBR, I did a redo backup and did a restore to a different HDD, did an F12 on rebooting and it booted into the new install so that's three times I've done it on two different machines.

Redo seems to auto look for the backup to be on a USB stick.

If you want screen shots I need help installing to the running Redo , I downloaded rather than install the gnome-screenshot app with synaptic and did a "dpkg -i *.deb" on the files but prntscr still didn't work.

I can record the video output of one machine with a second machine but I need to set it up again.

I guess redo would come in handy if I wanted to put windows on a bigger drive but I favour keeping windows on a small drive and adding another drive.

Tomorrows another day and I've had enough for one day.
Nite all, bye bye's beckons

[altman]

Will check it out ukbrian , thanx for the efforts here mate .