And awaits scathing comments re that partitioning scheme. I'd better explain.

I had Ubuntu and Mint happily dual-booting on a 40GB hard drive. I like a nice, simple partitioning scheme - /root, /home and swap. (And messing about with extended partitions where it helps.)

On purchasing a 160GB drive from my favourite auction site, I decided to be clever and simply clone the contents of the 40GB drive across to the new/second hand one, using Clonezilla. As Clonezilla usefully offers to resize the new partitions proportionally to the size of the new drive, I first shrank the / partitions to just a shade over the data they contained (I thought) - not wanting two 20GB /root partitions on a 160GB drive.

Not a great success - still ended up with a 13.6 GB Mint / partition, for instance.

Worse, however, was the fact that Clonezilla helpfully parked the extended partition containing Ubuntu and swap between Mint's /root and /home partitions.

Looks quite bizarre, but works fine apart from two minor things.

1) Mint no longer mounts the swap partition on start. It has to be commanded (actually, launching GParted, right-clicking on Swap and selecting swapon also works.) I almost never think to mount swap, and Mint seems quite comfortable without it - the computer has 1GB of RAM.

2) Every start is now verbose - masses of white text before the log-in screen.

All something to do with changed partition UUIDs, I gather, and frankly, not enough of a bother to do anything about it.

However, when Mint 9 final is out I plan to copy all the data to an external drive, delete the lot and install Mint from scratch - hopefully with a nice, simple /root, /home and swap partition scheme. I assume that putting them all inside one extended partition will leave options for further playing later - can one just have an extended partition?

That should leave a little space (currently occupied by Ubuntu) to run VBox, rather than multi-booting every time I want to try another distro on the same machine.

Meantime, it'll be interesting to see whether I ever manage to post another screenshot. That one only took an hour and a half.

Steve, thanks again. You don't know what you might have started...