I just got my lenovo s10 as a backup for my aging (still love it tough) ibook g4. Everything work’s find, except I really hates the way the drive was partitioned. It has a big C drive, with small “LENOVO” drive. Resizing with partition magic(error message: cant find primary partition), as well as using Easeus to clone it did not work (error message: can’t lock primary partition). So I decided some experiment. So here are steps that I took (that works) to move Windows XP to different drive(external USB) without using any image software.
1. Prepare the new drive with the first primary partition either FAT32 or NTFS freshly formated. If you ever wrote something to that partition, the migration wont work.
2. Copy ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini from the old drive to the new drive in that exact order. I’ve tried copying in different order without success to boot with error msg: “the drive is not bootable drive, insert flopy… bla bla bla”
3. Proceed copying the rest of the system file. Make sure not to overwrite any existing file. I used ubuntu live cd to do the copying with the command
$ cp -r -v -i /media/oldrive/* /media/newdrive
the commad will do the following: option -r will copy the file recursively, option -v will tell you what’s being done, and option -i prompt you if you want to overwrite the existing file. Just press ‘n’ if you prompt with one. Once completed, you can swap internal drive with the new one, and boot from the new drive.
I hope this guide can safe a lot of people times, as it took me a long two days to figure it out.
PS: I am keeping windows, just for the skype sake. the internal microphone just dont work in either ubuntu jaunty or linux mint – Felicia.
My OS Experience 