Moving Windows XP partition rendered it unbootable

Question

I had a WindowsXP and Ubuntu 9.04 installed side by side on my single 80GB harddrive. Recently I bought a new 500GB harddrive, cloned Windows partition using Ubuntu's dd, then reinstalled Ubuntu 10.4 on the new disk. New disk is now connected as master, with the old disk as slave. But... I can't boot Windows now at all, neither from old nor from new disk. After choosing Windows in GRUB2, I get a blank text screen with cursor in the home spot.

Windows had 15GB partition at the beginning of the old disk, starting in sector 63. Now I gave it ~17GB (to make sure its filesystem will fit, as I didn't have much time guessing how much exactly the old partition had. The new Windows partition starts in sector 2048.

Both old and new Windows partitions are bit-for-bit identical, checked using cmp.

Other than that, I see no obvious differences in setup.

Any ideas how to make it work again? This is a little bit urgent, because my sister badly needs to play The Sims ;-)

Answer 1

For a quick solution to appease your sister, swap the disks around, so that the old one is master. Make a Linux boot partition on the disk and you should have no further problems.

Windows probably won't be very keen on being moved around. The first problem is that the Windows boot system decides which Windows installation to boot from the list of disks/ partitions on the machine. So if it is execting to boot from the first partition on the first disk, it is going to have problems booting from either the first partition on the second disk (the old hard drive) or the second(? you say it starts at sector 2048) partition on the new drive. Try to preserve the disk set up that Windows knows, or you could try editing the boot.ini files.