Ubuntu

Moving Ubuntu and Windows from 2 Hdds to 1 Hdd...How

Asked by Barry Lynn Westbay

Recently purchased laptop with Win 7 Home Prem. installed.(5/2010) Decided I wanted to dual-boot Ubuntu. Because of limited space on my installed hdd(220GB), I suffered from download fever, I placed Ubuntu on an external hdd(160GB). I just purchased a 640GB internal drive for my laptop. What I would like to do is get both of my OS's on it without having to start form scratch. What I have in mind is this: Cloning my Win 7 hdd onto the new drive. Then copying my partitions from the external drive to the new drive. My problem from this point, is how to boot into Ubuntu. Do I have to install grub2 on the new drive. Or, can I arrange this dual-boot under windows. If, neither of those options will work, could I clone my Win hdd, then do a clean install of Ubuntu 10.04 from my live cd. Once, the install is done, download all the updates for Ubuntu. Then, since my install of Ubuntu is kept current, could I copy my Ubuntu partition from my external hdd and put it in place of the newly-created Ubuntu partition. Will this dual-boot plan work or do I need to go another route. By the way, my reason for not wanting to start from scratch with Ubuntu, is the amount of additions I've made to it would take me a lot of time and effort to reload. Thanks for any help you can provide.

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Answered
For:
Ubuntu Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

You can use partimage to copy the partiton over, the destination partitionn needs to be the same size or larger and it will work. You may have to reinstall grub to the new drive using a live CD and you will need to do the copying in liveCD too so the data is not in use.
Make sure your backups are recent enough incase of catastrophe and watch which partitions you set as source and destination.

Revision history for this message
inashdeen (inashdeen) said : 		#2

th ebest is, always put windows first, ubuntu second and re grub

Revision history for this message
delance (olivier-delance) said : 		#3

do like inashdeen advised.
You need to update Grub as UUID of partitions changed. As you will be unable to boot on Ubuntu, you must regrub from Live CD.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Reinstalling%20from%20LiveCD

Revision history for this message
actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#4

Inashdeen, the user wants to TRANSFER the current installs, not reinstall fresh. So your advice doesn't apply here.

Can you help with this problem?

Provide an answer of your own, or ask Barry Lynn Westbay for more information if necessary.

To post a message you must log in.