OT: Cloning windows XP with dd

    A while back I posted a question about cloning a Windows XP drive using
a Linux live CD such as Knoppix.  The suggestion to use "dd" was a good
one.  I googled this command and found detailed instructions on
www.nilbus.com for doing this.  In short, they said to:
    Use fdisk to create partitions on the new drive identical to those on
the old drive (using the -u option to display sectors rather than
cylinders, which ensure that they'll be the same.)
    Use dd to copy the 440 bytes of the boot partition.
    Use dd to copy the contents of the other partitions.
    The original drive was 120 GB.  The new one was a bit larger but I
didn't worry about the wasted space.  It was a slow operation, though. 
Copying the 5 GB compaq recovery partition took almost half an hour, and
copying the rest took all night!
    The problem is that once this was done, it would not boot from the new
drive.  I couldn't think of anything I'd done wrong.  I could see the
contents of the new drives under both Knoppix and XP (well, I couldn't
see the recovery partition under XP but what do you expect?)  It would
still boot with the old drive so the cable must have been OK.  I tried
both cable-select and setting the jumpers explicitly, to no avail.
    Symptoms:  On boot, the screen is blank except for a blinking cursor at
the upper left-hand corner.  It even skips the hardware info screen with
the HP logo.  If I hit the F-key (was it F2?) quickly I can view the
BIOS, and it sees the new Seagate drive just fine.
    I suspect that Compaq/HP (or possibly Microsoft) has put some devilish
twist in their setup to make it difficult for people to replace their
own drives.  If this was under warranty, we'd send it back, but that's
long past.  If it was my system (and not my sister's) I'd wipe out the
stupid XP and install some flavor of Linux.  Has anyone dealt with this
silly problem before?

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	Dan Lund at