[hllug] Re: OOP's and the Vista Recovery Tool to the rescue!
- From: Lee Parmeter <geek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: hllug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:39:30 -0600
Additional information added below -
Lee Parmeter wrote:
> 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>
>
The following gparted bug report directly relates to the problem I experienced:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=379482
I believe that the error occurs when/if the ntfs partition is moved
slightly after the shrink. In my case gparted took 2 hours to shrink the
185GB ntfs partition to 170GB and then took another 4 hours to move it to
the right; the move to the right was not something I asked it to do. So,
apparently this bug is still present in the gparted LiveCD I used (v0.3.9)
and there is no indication it has been fixed in the latest release.
gparted LiveCD:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/index.php
--
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
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