Windows XP, Ubuntu, GParted & Super Grub Disk
Yesterday I permanently shut down the old family desktop. I say family, but in reality it was the desktop used by Becky and Emma before they got their laptops. Anyhow, before shutting the desktop down for the last time, Becky asked if I would transfer her music and photo collection to her laptop.
Becky's laptop is one of my old machines, it's an Acer Travelmate 240. I used it for a good few years before handing it over to Becky sometime last year. Being one of my old machines, it was set-up for dual booting with Ubuntu and Windows XP. Unfortunately I've yet to persuade Becky to migrate to Linux, so she always boots the system into Windows XP.
Anyway, before attempting to move Becky's data I performed a quick check on her system. Turns out that I'd partitioned her 30GB drive in favour of Ubuntu, no surprise there, and Windows XP had less than 2GB of free space to play with. I asked Becky what she would like me to do, her reply, "You can remove that second-rate operating system, I don't want your linucks shite on my laptop" — or something along those lines.
Not wanting to take her bait, and not being a Linux zealot, I agreed. So, I inserted my CrunchBang Linux CD and booted the machine. I then ran GParted and removed Ubuntu's swap and ext3 partitions, before resizing the fat32 partition to use the whole drive [GParted is a fantastic tool!] Once I'd finished adjusting the partitions, I attempted a reboot, only to be presented with a GRUB error. I forgot that this would happen, GRUB couldn't find its configuration file as I'd removed it when I edited the disk partitions.
To fix Becky's now useless system, I inserted my copy of the Super Grub Disk and within a couple of minutes I'd managed to restore the MBR and configure the system so that it would boot directly into Windows XP. I then transferred Becky's data and decommissioned the old family desktop. Easy.
