Here's what I did:

I have a Dell dimension, which has XP installed (on an IDE Drive). I got a new SATA drive.

First I unplugged the old drive and tried to install window$ on the new one. Gonk. requires a driver disk from the manufacturer, and I don't have a floppy drive in the machine right now. Boo hiss. (if Steinberg and Sibelius would support Linux I wouldn't have this problem -- but I digress)

So I split up the drive and put SuSE 9.1 on the upper partitions (swap on 3, / on 4)... it installed without driver disk, though the installer couldn't quite seem to talk to the video card (SVGA, I mean, come on!) which made partitioning an interesting experience.

Then I rebooted XP by plugging the old drive in, and copied over the files to partition 1 using Wester Digital's Data Lifeguard. (I know how egocentric M$ operating systems are -- they are happier being on partition 1)

Unplugged the old drive, and after some experimentation got grub and the new Boot.ini set to reasonable values, at least as well as I could form browsing the internet.

So now Linux boots fine. But when I try XP, I get the black background initial window with the animated "thermometer," then it switches to the fancy blue "XP" window, then there is some disk activity and it freezes. An updated version of the "blue screen!"

I'm thinking it might be the 'pagefile.sys' which I might delete to forced windoze to reconstruct (I assume it's some sort of swap file).

Another painful (but typical M$ alternative) would be to install XP on the new partition, then copy the files again, to convince the installer to do whatever magic trick it needs to.

Any ideas? It seems like what I am attempting is a rare sequence of events. Most people don't seem to assume a copy will work without actually installing windows on the partition -- which would be a bit silly if it weren't for micro$oft's retarded os-centrism.

thanks,

-= miles =-