About two years ago, my HP Pavilion model:dv9715nr – 17″ notebook PC started it’s life with a Samsung SATA 250GB hard drive and Windows Vista. I immediately used the disk management app in the Windows Control Panel and shrunk the partition to half the hard drive size and put Fedora Linux on the other half of the drive.
Last year, I got a Western Digital 500GB drive and copied the 250GB to it using the Linux command line:
fdisk -l <-- this command told me which /dev each drive was on so I didn't copy the bare drive onto the one with the data.
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=32256
The copying process took a couple of hours using my desktop PC. The new drive worked fine, but I was stuck with a Windows partition of 121GB. During the year, I upgraded Vista to Windows 7 Home Premium, but still had the small windows partition.
About a week ago, I saw that WD now has a 750GB laptop drive. I also found the price was right for me at NewEgg. So I ordered one and also ordered three 2.5″ drive external enclosures to put the other drives in so I can use them as USB backup drives.
This time I was determined that I was not going to be stuck with the small Windows partition. What to do?
I copied the 500GB drive to the 750GB drive.
I put the drive into the laptop, and using gparted found on the SystemRescueCD, I deleted all the partitions except for the Windows partition.
After booting the Windows 7 Repair disk I created before starting the disk swap, I went to a command prompt and entered the command:
bootsect /nt60 ALL /mbr
I did this to write the Master Boot Record on the hard drive.
When I rebooted the machine, I got a black screen with the words “Operating System Not Found”.
Now what? I booted the laptop using the Super Grub Live CD I had created a while back, selected “Find any O/S” and was able to get into and run Windows 7. Now, how do I get the laptop to boot Windows 7? I went into the Windows 7 disk management found in the Control Panel and expanded the Windows partition to 350GB. Then It dawned on me that I had not made the Windows partition “active”.
Once I made the partition active, I was able to reboot the laptop with it booting Windows 7. Everything was intact from my old drive. It took a little while for Windows 7 to come up the first time. I found out it was looking for and installing the new Microsoft driver for the WD 750GB drive.
Finally, I got my Fedora 13 DVD, installed Fedora 13 on the other half of my drive, and restored my files over the network from my desktop Linux PC.
Success! Now my laptop dual-boots in either Windows 7 or Fedora 13 with each occupying about half of the new 750GB hard drive. And, the best part is that I didn’t have to re-install Windows! I also now have three 2.5″ USB external hard drives.