Duncansapien’s Techblog

Overview

ILA Teacher PC is a Dell Optiplex with single IDE drive and DVD ROM/ CD-RW device.

Issue

The PC may have problems and require restoration from disk backup. Use Gparted - Gnome Partition Editor.

Cloning Steps

1. With the PC on, place Gparted 3.4.5 boot CD in Dell’s drive.
2. Connect a USB drive caddy containing an IDE disk to the Dell but do not power on yet.
3. Reboot the Dell PC.
4. At BIOS time, press F12 for boot menu. Select option 5 - IDE CD device.
   IMPORTANT: The CD drive is twitchy - if Gparted does not appear to be loading after 4-5 seconds, reboot the PC with CTRL+ALT+DEL and try again. Repeat until Gparted loads. Version 3.7.7 of Gparted, burned on the Lightscribe CDs, almost never loads but v3.4.5 is quite successful.
5. As soon as Gparted loads, switch on the power to the USB IDE caddy.
6. Gparted has trouble with the dual-display graphics adapter and requires a slight manual tweak.
   When prompted, enter the command Forcevideo. Then enter vesa (as type of driver) and 1024×768 for video resolution.
7. The Dell hard disk is shown as /dev/hda. The external USB disk is shown as /dev/sda.

The Dell hard disk has three partitions

• a tiny FAT partition - what for is unknown
• a 14Gb NTFS partition, this is drive C: and is flagged as BOOT
• a 10Gb NTFS partition, this is drive D: and holds only D:temp.

To restore the C: drive, first of all delete the 14Gb C: on /dev/hda (and Apply) then copy and paste the same partition  - it is the only one 14Gb in size - from /dev/sda1 (and apply).

Lastly, once copying has taken place, right-click on the newly copied C: drive partition and choose "Manage Flags". Ensure the checkbox next to BOOT is checked as this is the boot partition.