Ghost in the machine
 

Not sure how this happened or how to fix it..... but as it looks... definitely stuck.

I finally broke my main system down into 2 machines... one linux, one windows. Tired of rebooting multiple times a day...

I have 2 hard drives on the main machine, 1, 1tb, and 1, 2tb partitioned down to drives.

Windows was installed on the 1tb drive and linux on the one of the partitions of the 2tb drive.

Somehow, linux and windows swapped. Windows is where linux was on the 2tb drive and linux where windows was on the 1tb drive. Thinking this is no biggie, I can take the 1tb out and put it in the other system. Simple! Nope!

The 1tb drive still has a link to windows and will not boot either OS even though Linux in installed.

Is there a way to back up the entire Linux system... everything... make an exact duplicate of the drive and restore it on the other system?

Or am I stuck moving files manually over the network? It's not that big of a deal to move the files... but some things will still need to be set up again and a lot of preferences will be gone as well.

Any suggestions welcome :thumbsup

I can't understand the first part of your post, but why not just plug the drives back in the way they were when they worked?

That aside, assuming you're talking about Windows and Linux being on different drives, it just sounds like a boot issue.

It's more than ten years since I used Windows so I'd say if you have a Windows CD, just put that in. Otherwise find a grub for Windows or, if you get Linux working (as below) make a LiveCD/USB with boot repair (help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair) to fix the boot on the Windows drive.

Assuming for the Linux drive you have a grub error, ie, a screen that says:

grub rescue>

Type:

ls (lowercase LS, to be clear)

That will give you a list of partitions in the format:

(hd0) (hd0,msdos1)

hd0 is your drive, msdosX is the partition. One of them will be the boot partition. If there are several and you don't know which one, just try them one by one.

So in the above result for ls, type:

set prefix=(hd0,msdos1)/boot/grub

Then type:

insmod normal

Then type:

normal

This should boot Linux, and if so run update-grub (or whatever command your Linux uses to update grub).

Hi ZTT...

Looking at the partitions, it looks like the 1tb drive has a microsoft reserve partition and the recovery partition.

I think I am remembering a little over a year ago I had an issue with windows and used the recovery... I think that is when it changed from the 1tb to the 2tb drive.

But yes, this should have been as simple as removing the linux hard drive. But for some reason windows split itself from the 1 hard drive into two... main OS on one and the recovery on the other.

It's a mess....

There's two solutions:
Recover:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...6-73fab304c246
Or
Create a Boot
https://www.acronis.com/en-us/articles/usb-boot/