can linux save my life again?

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 11:16 -0700, Josh Coffman wrote:
> Ok, maybe not my life but my pc. Linux has saved my
> butt a couple times in the last year. I am now working
> from home and built a pc for this purpose. The
> drawback is that it is as a windows programmer. So
> windows is the only OS on my desktop. :(
> 
> Problem is that I was so excited to get it built and
> working that I forgot to supply the SATA driver to the
> windows install. So it installed the win boot loader
> on a 20 gig partition of a secondary IDE drive; and
> Windows on the first 80 gig of my SATA.
> 
> This is not what I really want. I want to boot from
> the SATA drive. And I dont want to spend another 15
> hours installing windows and the software I need.
> 
> What I'd like to do is move the windows partition,
> setup the boot partition, and add Fedora on this box.
> 
> I was thinking i could use the GParted Live distro to
> move the windows partition, then install Fedora and
> use GRUB to boot windows. (and maybe get VMWare
> running windows under linux. :)
> 
> Does this soudn like it could work?
----
I'm not sure what you're after here...

It would seem that the 'first' drive seen by BIOS is your IDE drive. You
can figure that out by looking at the file C:\boot.ini (which may not be
visible depending upon your 'View Options'

If you wanted to copy the boot blocks...you could do a simple dd
command...

boot from cd and figure out which drive is which and copy the first 466
bytes from your ide drive to your sata drive...

dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/sda bs=466

then you could shut down, disconnect the IDE drive and see if Windows
boots.

If you boot the Windows CD (assuming Windows XP disk), you could also go
to 'Recovery' mode and run things like FIXMBR (which should do something
similar but if your IDE drive is still connected, it will probably just
write it again to that drive) and FIXBOOT (which does have an option for
verbose and displays the contents of the aforementioned boot.ini file
before/during write operation.

Craig