I'm going through the usual pain trying to upgrade my laptop.  Copying
NetBSD worked flawlessly (of course), but I'm having a lot of trouble
trying to get Windows copied over.  A simple image copy (from NetBSD) of
the partition wouldn't finish booting, even though the BIOS geometry is
the same.  Partition Magic appeared to work, but some essential service
crapped out during initialization (SVC mumble, XYZZY is a Pure Virtual
Function, or some such, so no windows would open); besides, Partition
Magic gets very concerned that some partitions have a different
geometry.  I believe that -- after zeroing the first 8K blocks of the
disk, I get:

# fdisk wd1
fdisk: primary partition table invalid, no magic in sector 0
Disk: /dev/rwd1d
NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
cylinders: 193821, heads: 16, sectors/track: 63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 195371568

BIOS disk geometry:
cylinders: 1023, heads: 240, sectors/track: 63 (15120 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 195371568

OTOH, wd0 also shows different geometries, without apparent trouble for
the last two years:

# fdisk wd0
Disk: /dev/rwd0d
NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
cylinders: 116280, heads: 16, sectors/track: 63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 117210240

BIOS disk geometry:
cylinders: 1023, heads: 240, sectors/track: 63 (15120 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 117210240

I could simply try Select All/Copy/Paste, but I have no idea then how
to make the partition bootable into XP.

I'm on the verge of simply reinstalling Windows on the new drive, using
the recovery disks; while there's not much application software (and no
application data...) on that partition, I don't really feel like
spending the time downloading \aleph_0 critical security patches.

Any suggestions?


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb