Planetfurry BBS

Kasyl · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 9:08 pm Post subject: Digital Death

It sounded like a good idea at the time.

That is my defense.

I seem to have destroyed my computer by trying to dual-boot Vista with Ubuntu. Vista may be gone, along with all my files. All I have left is about 30 GB of my hard drive that I partitioned for Ubuntu. The other 130 GB seems to have vanished.

I don't know what to do. I've tried almost all solutions. I may have to reinstall Vista, causing the loss of all my files. I can recover most of them, as most of what I care about is backed up in several places, but it will be a long and difficult process to regain what I may lose.

I'm going to take my little Lappy back to the place of its purchase and see if they can fix it. Until then, I'm stuck using Ubuntu. Which refuses to access the Internet. Which is why I'm using my parent's computer to write this and search for answers.

It's what being a bit of a nerd gets me. Crap.

This sucks.

Styx · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 10:21 pm Post subject:

Look at it this way if the patition is gone the data is already toast so you may as well start the painful process. If I may offer a suggestion next time get a separate hard drive to keep your data on (documents, mp3s, pics and so on) and run windows and your apps from the 130GB partition that way the next time windows gets ganked your data is safe.

WhiteStorm · Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2008 8:26 am Post subject:

Wait... when you start the computer, before it boots into ubuntu, is there a 3 second timer?

When I want to boot into xp I have to press escape there and select it.

Kasyl · Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2008 4:53 pm Post subject:

It's been fixed! I am back to running Vista again.

Teric · Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2008 5:26 pm Post subject:

What was the problem?

Kasyl · Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2008 8:24 pm Post subject:

I tried to dual-boot Vista with Ubuntu, and the Linux boot manager wouldn't recognize the Windows partition. It said that pretty much all of my files were gone.

[Crash] · Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 1:11 am Post subject:

Good to know, because I was planning to try something of this nature later.

Thanks mate!

Shadu · Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 8:30 am Post subject:

Kasyl · Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 7:01 pm Post subject:

Exactly.

ScottyDM · Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2008 7:45 am Post subject:

Install either Windows or Linux fresh (do a low level format) then put VMWare on top of that, then put the other OS inside of VMWare. You boot your first OS, then VMWare, then your second OS. So you end up with both OSs running at the same time.

VMWare is also useful for experimenting with viruses and other icky things as it runs each copy of your OS in its own sandbox. You can run multiple copes of Vista if you like (although Microsoft would like you to pay for each copy). Do a crash and burn on one, then wipe and rebuild that sandbox. Some tech support departments use VMWare so each support tech has a copy of each version and type of the OS they support.

There's a version of VMWare for OS X. It's for those who want to run OS X, one or more flavors of Windows, and one or more flavors of Linux. You can also run the x86 version of Solaris under VMWare, if you're so inclined. Such a setup eats stupendous amounts of RAM though.

Scotty