replacing an old dual-boot system drive to new SATA drive

The saga of hard fought battles continues. Last night into early this morning, I was able to replace my old 80GB, 2MB cache system drive with a brand, spanking new 250GB SATA drive with 16MB cache! I encountered a number of hassles along the way.

Here was the plan:
1) connect new drive and partition Win file systems in XP
2) backup/restore original NTFS file system
3) install FC4 in free space
4) create an inter-OS shareable FAT32 partition
5) backup/restore original FC4 filesystems (root/boot)
6) enjoy the fruits of my labor

Here's how it turned out:
1) unplug Storage drive
2) connect new SATA drive
3) boot to XP and remove extraneous files on system drive
4) partition 50GB NTFS partition and leave rest of free space for Linux and a FAT
5) boot to Ghost and make a backup of NTFS
* Initially, I was going to create the image on my USB drive. However, the Ghost disk support for USB drives must be USB1.1 as the clock said the image was going to finish in 3 hours!! Forget it: I rebooted and created the image on my internal Storage drive. Took 12 minutes.
6) restored backup to new 50GB NTFS partition. Success here.
7) install FC4 on unused space on SATA drive. I yanked power on my RAID set and Storage drive as to not have any chance of overwriting those drives. Filesystems:
/boot: 128MB, /root: 120GB, swap: 6GB, 60GB unallocated space
8) boot into XP to partition the free space as FAT32.
* XP won't allow you to partition unallocated space if the unallocated space appears after a partition it cannot read. Need another solution pronto!
9) booted into FC4 to see if fdisk can create a FAT32 partition. We are in luck! It can!
10) how to format? I researched and found that "mkdosfs" will format FAT32 systems in FC4. If you take the defaults, the command goes something like this:
mkdosfs -v -n VOLUME /dev/sda6
Success!
11) boot into sysresccd to backup FC4 system with partimage. No go!
* Sysrescue cd hangs on my SATA drive using pre 0.2.19 version of sysrescue. Downloaded latest upgrade to sysrescue cd, burned .iso to CD and booted with it in order to resolve issue.
12) ok! so sysrescue cd works. started partimage and backed up FC4 /boot and /root to the new FAT32 partition on the SATA drive. Had to mount the drive in the system first, though.
13) restored only the root partition to /dev/sda3.
14) mounted the restored partition. Turned off my RAID partition and redirected the swap to /dev/sda5 in /etc/fstab and started in runlevel 3.
15) rebooted. System came up with two errors regarding the swap and RAID partitions. Fixed the swap error with SWAP=/dev/sda6. Reenabled /dev/md0 in fstab.
16) rebooted again. Came up clean! HOO-AH!!
17) changed inittab to runlevel 5 and rebooted. Default NVidia splash screen came up. Logged in and verified all is well!

2am and I'm going to bed!
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