This has been a total nightmare! But it’s been fun too!

I’m trying to transfer Android from an Acer D250 to another Acer D250 without Android. I want Android because it boots quick for web browsing (and I’m not leaving it on standby like some fools on Twitter suggest), Gentoo because it’s great for web development and Windows XP for graphics designy stuff. Because GIMP sucks.

If anyone’s got any questions as to WHY I had to do it this way, please do comment. After a week of having trouble; mostly with Windows XP – I got to to work using a DVD Drive, 3 SD cards, 3 HDDs, two IDE-USB converters, Ghostzilla, BartPE and SysRecCD. I also needed nLite for the original XP installation I’d made.

Before starting, I had a working Android/XP installation, a installation of Gentoo (originally made on another machine) and my installation of Windows XP too.

1. Backup Gentoo to a .tar.gz
2. Backup Windows XP with NTFSClone
3. Use Ghostzilla to duplicate the working Android/XP to Netbook – Android and XP both work fine...
4. Use NTFSClone and restore to a secondary drive
5. Make a BartPE CD with the Intel Storage drivers
6. Boot BartPE and delete everything on the NetBook’s C: drive
7. Copy all the files from the restored NTFSclone image (on a secondary drive) to the C: drive in BartPE
8. Reboot and hope! You should now have Android, and your installation of Windows XP
9. Backup using GhostZilla since it’s now got Android and XP on.
10. Reboot into SysRecCD
11. Use gParted to resize Netbook’s drive to make space for Gentoo and swap partition. You’ll have to move the 4GB FAT32 shared partition of Android/XP. Make the two new partitions (ext3 and swap) for Linux as Logical partitions.
12. Then do mke2fs and mkswapfs on the new partitions.
13. Extract the gentoo.tar.gz to the ext3 partition
14. Don’t install Grub. It’ll probably break everything. Boot back into Windows XP.
15. Download the latest Grub4Dos and copy grldr to the root of C:
    
16. Edit the boot.ini to add in (info here)
    

       C:\grldr="Gentoo Linux"

17. Make a menu.lst file and add in your boot stuff (info here); mine is:

      timeout 0

      title Gentoo Linux

      root (hd0,4)

      kernel /boot/bzImage root=/dev/sda5

Then back it all up!!

WOOOHOOO! I’ve learnt loads after doing this! Huge thanks to @rbsfou and to @kichimi; and especially to @flirtygertie for her Netbook and putting up with me too!

Hope it helps someone! Any questions, please do ask!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 10:55 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.