How to migrate XP, Vista, Linux, BSD and Solaris to a bigger hard disk

[saikee]

Mark_in_Hollywo,

Welcome to Justlinux.


sda1 to sda4 are reeserved primaries. Thus after cloning the excess of 297Gb is at the end of sda5 of you previous 20Gb. It would appear to me that you might have created sda5 at the end of your 20Gb disk resulting the remaining space at the front end of the extended partition sda2 used up as sda6.

The partition table suggests that you had created the partitions in the order of sda1, sda2, sda5 and sda6. The partition order is a bit unusual but it is healthy.

What you want to achieve by putting the excess 297Gb into sda1 is achieveable and I would suggest the following steps.

(1) Fire up the Ubuntu in the 20Gb disk and invoke a Grub shell by command

sudo grub

(2) Verify the (hd0) is your sdb (by having no 3rd partition because Grub count from 0 and sdb4 would be the partition (3). That your sda is disk (hd1) by commands

geometry (hd0)
geometry (hd1)

(3) Assuming (hd0) is sdb you then hide the extended partition sda2 by command

hide (hd1,1)

Re-check the partition by command

geometry (hd1)

which should show up only 4 partitions from 0 to 3 with the two logical partitions disappear. This is an intentended action so don't be alarmed. You then exit Grub by command "quit" to go back to Ubuntu.

(4) You then fire up Gparted inside the Ubuntu. Using it to delete sda4. You then bodily move sda2 to the extreme end of the 320Gb disk. Repeat the same for sda3 which should butt against sda2 at the end of the hard disk leaving a huge space of 297Gb between sda1 and sda3.

(5) You resize the end boundary of sda1 to absorb the desired space. You have now achieved you objective. So invoke a Grub shell. This time you unhide the sda2 by command

unhide (hd1,1)

(6) There is a 50% proability that Grub's action of step (3) and (5) are not accepted in Linux. This is to say Ubuntu still uses the original Bios setting and the partitions are unchanged after you exit Grub. In such case let us know and we can advise a different approach.

(7) Technically there is no need to restore Grub if sda1 is the "/" of Ubuntu. However you should remove the sdb temporily when booting sda. If you do have difficulty you can restore Grub when the PC boots to a Grub screen. Instead of slecting a system to boot you can press "c" to get a Grub prompt. You now have (hd0) as your sda and Grub can be restore by Grub commands

root (hd0,0)
setup  (hd0)

If Grub reports no error your new Ubuntu should boot without a reboot using command

root (hd0)
chainloader +1
boot

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There are more elegant ways to achieve what you want but the above is based on Gparted which is is technically sound and worthy of knowing the steps.