[hllug] OOP's and the Vista Recovery Tool to the rescue!
- From: Lee Parmeter <geek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: hllug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:58:19 -0600
Hey, finally one of my daughters teenage friends asked me to put Linux on
their Toshiba laptop; a dual boot with Vista and Ubuntu. Yea!!
Oh but then a big OOP's.
After running defrag on Vista's ntfs partition, I used gparted to shrink
the ntfs partition (/dev/sda2) a little to make room for at least a '/' and
swap partition for Linux. The ntfs partition was 185 GB so I shrunk it down
to 170 GB. Then I booted the machine to see if all was well and got the
notorious unable to boot vista error; could not find
"\windows\system32\winboot.exe".
Note: I had done the "Vista shrink" before on my wife's new HP laptop
without a hitch!
The owner of the Toshiba laptop did not make the Vista Restore Media nor
have a "real" Vista O/S install DVD and the ghost partition on the laptop
(/dev/sda1) was also non-bootable at this point.
I went ahead an installed Linux and grub on the machine and could now boot
into Linux and mount the Vista partition.
# mount -t ntfs /dev/sda2 /mnt/vista
The data turned out to be OK! So, I proceed to back-up the user data to my
1 TB USB backup drive that is connected to my server using "secure copy" (scp).
# scp -r /mnt/vista/(blah blah)/users lee@xxxxxxxxxxxxx:/media/backup/vista
There was about 60 GB of data and it took more than an hour to backup.
Some of the things I learned along the way:
==========================================
a. Both Toshiba and HP do not provide the Microsoft Recovery Tool that is
normally on a std Vista install DVD. The only method the vendors support is
restoring the original disk image; destroying all your data in the process.
b. The boot menu is no longer in a text file (boot.ini) but is in a
registry like entry and must be edited using a utility called bcdedit.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709667.aspx
The down side is that you have to be able to get access to the partition in
a windows environment to run the utility. I tried booting to the recovery
console in both WIN2000 and WinXP and in both cases, there was no drive C
found.
My problems turned out to be more complicated than just a BCD entry.
However, Microsoft did create a very good recovery tool which was able to
repair the partition. The first time I ran the tool, the partition
selection window was empty; no partitions were found. But I ran the
recovery tool anyway. Afterwards the machine still failed to boot with the
same error. So, I booted with the recovery disk again and this time it
found a partition but the size was set as 0 bytes. Then a pop-up menu
appeared that said the partition needed to be fixed so I responded with an
OK with the mouse. The next time I booted the laptop and selected Vista
from the grub menu, it booted into Vista and all was well again!
So, I would recommend that you download this recovery tool and burn a CD.
You may need it some day!
<http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,71039/description.html>
--
Lee Parmeter
http://www.bubbasgeek.com
"When it comes to Vista: just say NO! If you're not ready for Linux, buy a
MAC!" - Lee Parmeter
"God is not a republican or a democrat nor is His government a democracy!"
- Lee Parmeter
______________________________________________________________________________
Highland Lakes Linux User Group (HLLUG): http://www.hllug.org
HLLUG mailing list: //www.freelists.org/list/hllug
Other related posts:
