nnngh h8

[solarbird]

Macbook dropped off: sucks to be me until next week. Or later. NNngh.

I've been working with kimo trying to get that machine to have a new HD and dual-boot WinXP and Linux. I think, or thought, I had all the partitions set up and the Windows partitions from the old HD copied over, but only one of them mounts properly under Linux and I have no idea what's wrong with the other one but NTFS-fs thinks it's horribly corrupted. In both cases, I made new partitions larger than the originals; the one that worked is FAT32, the one that didn't is NTFS. Would this have fucked things up on NTFS?

Also, and even more annoyingly, I can't write the old MBR onto the new drive, so I thought np, I'll run repair from the WinXP Pro install disc that I of course still have. So I boot off it, and XP checks hardware, and hangs. Hard. No idea why. This is the same install disc I used for this same machine with identical hardware except for the new hard drive, and the new hard drive is just a plain old ATA/EIDE single drive, so I doubt that's it. No error messages, no nothing; black screen and GTFO.

Oh, the linux partition is so I can run ardour. Eventually. I hope. I suppose I could throw out the old media drive (which is dying of plate rot anyway) and make a non-boot NTFS partition on the new drive to replace that, and boot Linux off the second partition on the new drive, but I don't want to keep the original crap drive because it made XP performance a world of pain, and I'd like this 2.7Ghz machine not to be slower and more painful to use than the PIII/550 I'm using right now.

So other than RAGE, anybody got any suggestions?

Comments

[mundivagant.livejournal.com]

I'm not really understanding what you did...was it a sector copy of the partitions? (edit) Was it while booted in Windows or booted in Linux that you did the copying? Because if you copied an NTFS partition onto another NTFS partition...well, I'm really sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you're probably hosed. The reason is that Linux does NOT play well with NTFS. I know the kernel claims NTFS write support is stable now. They lie. Like rugs. A sector copy of an NTFS partition into another NTFS partition would likely break their write support horribly and corrupt the partition.

[solarbird]

Sector copy; booted to linux, but doing raw sector copy into an empty (and in fact unformatted) partition.

I'm kind of hoping that the partition is in fact good and NTFS-fs is lying to me or just otherwise confused. But since my XP install DVD has decided to say HA HA FUXX0R J00 I can't run NT diagnostics on it.

[mundivagant.livejournal.com]

I'm going to ask my wife about this (once she's awake tomorrow) and get back to you. She's actually taking classes in this sort of thing and can make suggestions I can't. Is this super urgent? Will you need it before tomorrow?

[solarbird]

Nah, I can't even work on it tonight. Thanks ^_^

[mundivagant.livejournal.com]

Okay, I've got another question for you. Was the sector copy of the (readable) vfat partition also into an unformatted partition?

Long story short -- you probably know this, but just to be safe -- the problem with NTFS (aka "Not This Fucking System", various other profane acronyms) is exactly that the NTFS format is proprietary. (Short comparison here (http://cquirke.mvps.org/ntfs.htm), in the unlikely event that this is new to you). vfat (aka fat32) and earlier are public domain. So any non-Windows OS that attempts to read or write NTFS is actually based on reverse engineering of the file system. This causes some problems because an NTFS partition apparently can only be booted after a sector copy from a machine with an identical cylinder geometry (http://www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsclone). Why this is key is beyond my wife and I...we just know it causes problems.

So it's possible your data is NOT corrupt but you need to sector copy AGAIN, this time back onto the (repaired) old drive. But since you copied onto a disk with different physical parameters NTFS may simply be puking on mount due to sector/cylinder mismatch.

[solarbird]

The vfat partition was also onto an increased-size unformatted partition, yes.

an NTFS partition apparently can only be booted after a sector copy from a machine with an identical cylinder geometry.
Okay, I was afraid of that, or something like that. So how do you do this, anyway? Given that for whatever reason I can't just reinstall XP and then do it the smart way, I mean.

[mundivagant.livejournal.com]

Ummm...well, I've not messed with this personally, but the only thing I can really suggest would be to make identical partitions on your old hard drive once you get it back, then sector copy the NTFS partition exactly to where it used to be. That or find a hard drive with the same cylinder size and make a partition of identical size. I really hope you don't need an identical bios version, as a couple of websites suggest...I mean, NTFS couldn't be that stupid, right...I mean...I think I see why so many IT professionals end up alcoholics now...

FWIW, I hope this works. I've done a lot of fighting with dead drives for data ("oh look, another dead seismometer"), but never on NTFS.