My dual-boot machine has gone through some changes,
as all of the hardware doesn't seem to work with Linux
on that particular machine.

1. Ubuntu Studio (spoiled by 8.10's nvidia problems)

2. Ubuntu Ultimate (I corrupted Synaptic somehow trying webcam fixes)

3. 64 Studio (parts didn't work, couldn't figure how to edit grub like
Ubuntu's start-up manager does so easily)

4. Back to Ubuntu Ultimate...

For some stupid reason when I installed Ub-Ultimate this
last time, I changed the location of the boot-loader to
"WinXP" partition instead of the main HDD itself like usual.

This totally f'ed up the main Windows partition, making the
file type unreadable and therefore unmountable through Puppy,
Knoppix, Gparted and even SuperGrub. Grub was seriously messed
up too. And I don't have the Winxp retail disks, so repairing
the install wasn't an option.

No sweat, I thought, although I didn't clone my hdd before the
recent installs, I did do it just before ditching Studio, about
2 wks or less ago, and most of my data is on an external drive,
with some more on a separate FAT32 partition, still readable.

But, when I swapped the hdd with my cloned one, it came up
with a SMART bad error and wouldn't even boot, meaning the
hdd was close to failure (I made sure it wasn't a disk-still
in-use-error). It still worked in an ext enclosure, but I
first had to use that enclosure on my orig hdd to offload
what data was left.

Then I booted with Clonezilla and tried a partition replacement
which made the partition readable but not bootable. Finally
doing a full re-cloning with Clonezilla did the trick, but
I had to correct a couple drive letters that were off from within
Windows, affecting the restore partition and overall functions.

A simple mistake cost me a whole day of anguish, but at least it
worked and now I know my external clone needs replacing.