So, of course, I had to reinstall. :-(
Win7 boots by having a separate partition with the boot loader, etc. Something apparently got mangled along the way during my partition shrinking and dd adventures, and Win7 refused to boot no matter what I did.
Linux saw the contents of the partition just fine, but Win7 would show the OS partition as being blank. I spent a few hours with pointers from Terabyte Unlimited's web page, messed around with BootItBM (a very nice tool) on a bootable USB stick, and ran the Win7 repair from the original Dell install DVD, but nothing worked. BootItBM said to run scandisk or chkdsk /f from Winders.... :-/
So, I finally punted and installed the M4 in the laptop and installed Win7 on the 450+GB partition.
It went fine. Took forever though (including 135 updates of the OS).
I had 28 GB unpartitioned at the end of the M4 disk, so tonight I installed Linux Mint 13 (LTS) Xfce 64-bit on it. There were a couple of minor glitches, but it installed fine. It's a very nice, clean, distribution.
And of course, it sees the NTFS partition on the original 750GB drive in the USB interface just fine.
So, I'm copying stuff over from the old NTFS partition via a USB interface onto the M4 while Mint is booted. Tomorrow I will reinstall the Winders software I use most, and worry about the other stuff later.
I think I'll check at work to see if they'd be upset if I used Mint as my OS and ran Win7 in a VM. This Winders stuff is a nightmare that continues to get worse... :-/ (You can party now, Greg. ;-)
I hope this helps someone else out there.
Cheers,
Scott.