The Blog of Harald

I brought the new (well, old) server home last week; installed Debian on it on Saturday. (Debian is a strange distribution, but that’s another blog entry :-).

I decided that I was going to move the MP3 collection from the Win2K box to the new server (running Linux). So I want to put my smaller 15Gb drive in place of the 30Gb drive that’s in there right now, and put the 30Gb in the fileserver. I dutifully repartition the 15Gb drive into two pieces, format the two partitions as NTFS, reboot into DOS, and ghost the boot partition from the 30Gb to the 15Gb. Boot up, and everything works ok. Remove the 30Gb drive. Boot up; can’t login. Every account is the same. With the 30Gb drive in place (but not as the boot drive or system partition), the system works; without it, nobody can log in.

I noticed that when the machine booted with both drives, it thought that the system drive was still drive F:, so I tried removing drive letters from all drives. Another series of reboots; still no go (although the system drive is now C: like it’s supposed to be).

I’m stumped at this point. I Googled, and most people said “system restore”, but I’m not sure I want to go down that road yet. I did see a couple of articles suggesting that voodoo might work: the suggestion is to reformat the 15Gb drive from the ground up (to make sure no old data is interfering with the ghosting or booting). I’ll try that tonight; if it doesn’t work, I may have to go the system restore route; Ugh :-)

Anyway, that’s what I did last night, instead of folding laundry :-)