Adding Hard Drive; Moving OS's

[catacon]

Right now I have two hard drives, a 40GB and a 15GB. The 40GB is shared between Windows and Linux (Windows - 25GB, Linux - 15GB) and 15GB is used for music. I would like to add an 80GB hard drive and move Windows to that and let Linux use the 15GB HD. I would then use the 40GB for music and share it between the OS's. Can I move the OS's without reinstalling and losing everything and if so, what is the best way to do this?

Thanks!

[faulkner132]

I don't think Windows is very accomodating to moving your system partition, so it may be easiest to image your Windows partition and then update your bootloader to point each OS to their respective drives. I've tried with Windows 2000 in the past, but got frustrated and just formatted the drive and restored all the data from my backup.

[catacon]

So how do I image Windows and reconfigure the boot loader? Linux I could just reinstall, I main just want to move Windows.

[faulkner132]

For imaging, I don't know of a free tool (maybe someone else does?), but you can use a commercial package such as Ghost.

To configure your bootloader, it would depend on what you are using. Do you know? What does the screen look like when you are selecting your OS when you first boot?

[catacon]

I am using GRUB from Linux. The default OS is Linux, but I can select Windows by htting enter.

[faulkner132]

All you would have to do then is update your Grub configuration file (in your /boot partition in Linux) to point to the new hard drive for Windows. You can find the hard drive location in Linux by using either fdisk or dmesg.

[catacon]

This is a free trial of a image-tool, what do you think?

http://www.drive-image.com

[faulkner132]

Looks ok to me. 15-day free trial, so give it a shot.