I have a Linux Mint 12 KDE drive which has a GPT partition.

I also have a newly constructed Kubuntu drive using MBR partitions.

I simply want to copy the data from the Mint 12 KDE drive to partitions on the Kubuntu drive.

The partitions involved in both cases are:
/
/home

The partitioning is the same on both drives in that / and /home are the same sizes (approximately).
I can use either Mint 12 KDE or Kubuntu on the same machine but not both drives at the same time
because of GPT and MBR partition problems.

I have tried various methods to copy the /home and /big partitions from the tower to a Kubuntu drive in a USB enclosure
but the files won't copy over with cp or rsync.

The / partition is already established by loading the Kubuntu system so I don't need to do anything except load a few programs that exist on the Mint 12 KDE drive to the Kubuntu drive via apt-get.
I actually have a working Kubuntu system which only needs the customizations and files on the MInt 12 KDE.

I now believe that the reason that Mint 12 uses GPT partitions because someone put the wrong flag in the DVD.
To the best of my knowledge, it was not me that knowingly installed a GPT partition scheme - I didn't even know about it.

So ... I am hoping that someone will tell me how to copy sectors from Mint 12 KDE /home to Kubuntu /home.

Please help me!

Larry

What happens when you type in a terminal in kubuntu replace sdx with the partition you want to copy.
It could be that Kubuntu doesn't recognize the filesystem on the gpt partitions. Do you know with which filesystem the gpt partitions are formatted.

gpt vs. MBR shouldn't matter. Are these LVM ?.
Tell what you did - and what happened. In detail.

cp or rsync should be just fine - copying at the sector level is a very bad idea.

Might be an idea to go get bootinfoscript and post the RESULTS.txt it generates.