Getting rid of XP

[Frank Golden]

Hi Folks, a little background here.I've been using Win 7 since the beta in a multiboot setup.The other MS OS was my old XP install.It was located at the start of my drive.To install Win 7 I simply created an appropriately sized partition at the end of my drive to install Win 7 on.When each new version or Win 7 was released I simply installed to the partition at the end of the drive.I also have 4 Linux distros in the space in between the MS OS's.I've been using the final release of Win 7 for about 9 months now.I recently began experiencing minor but annoying issues with Win 7 so I figured it was time for a re-install.Since I haven't used XP much since starting my adventure with Win 7 I decided to jettison XP and recover the disk space.My plan was to ultimately install Win 7 at the start of the drive in place of XP.I didn't want to mess up my original setup while re-installing Win 7, at least not until I had completely setup and customized my new install.Here is what I did.I had a spare drive laying around so I partitioned it with 2 NTFS partitions.The first partition created was the same size as the original XP\Win 7 partitions (23069 MB).I did this so I could clone the new install to my drive later.The other partition, the rest of the space, was NTFS too.This was to contain most of my programs and all my user documents folders.This keeps the Win 7 footprint fairly small.I installed the spare drive into my laptop and installed Win 7 to that first partition.After updating and setting up to my tastes I installed all my programs and apps., being sure to have the installersinstall to the second partition.I had a similar setup on my original drive but it was a bit haphazard having evolved over time.When everything was setup like I wanted I did some disk clean up and defragged.Next, using Clonezilla I created an image of my new Win 7 install saving it to a USB Flash drive.I plugged my old drive into a hard drive dock and manually copied the data from the new drives second NTFSpartition to the partition on my old drive that was used for the same purpose after blanking it.I next used Clonezilla to restore the image of the new install to the first partition of my old drive, replacing XP with Win 7.When Clonezilla was done I restarted my computer and voila Win 7 on my first partition, XP gone.I knew that Clonezilla would restore my MBR thereby messing up my GRUB multiboot menu.After making sure everything was alright I booted into my SuperGrub CD and restored GRUB to get back my original boot menu.I now had the same boot menu I had before, with Win 7 as my default OS and all my Linux distros available like before.The space at the end of the drive taken up by my old Win 7 install I reclaimed by formatting it to ext3 an installing anotherLinux distro.Everything works great now and the errors are history.The above may sound risky but it really wasn't because I had Clonezilla images of all my original OS's saved just in case.I also have another, smaller drive with an identical setup to my original saved in case I ever need to access XP again.Total time about 5 hours.

[Frank Golden]

fascinating. did i understand this to be a ~laptop~ ? if so, all the more interesting.

Yes, I've had it since spring 2006.Runs Win 7 great.Interesting sidenote, since moving to the first partition Win 7 boots a little quicker.I installed Ubuntu Ultimate Edition 2.1 64 bit on the 24 GB partition that used be at the end of the drive (former Win 7 partition).I think I will be looking for other distros to install there to play with.

[Frank Golden]

... try debian...

Just might.Just got done installing Ultimate Edition 2.6 (Lucid Lynx based) in place of the earlier Ultimate Edition 2.1 64 bit (intrepid based).Will play with that for awhile first.