Let's play "What Was Wrong With my Computer?!??!?"

[Occulus]

So. I got bored the other day, and decided to play with Ubuntu. Now, I had Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my linux partition, and I wanted to upgrade it to Ubuntu 10.10, but I wanted a fresh install, preferably one that squeaked and shined. So, I hunted around for a blank DVD....

and hunted....

and HUNTED....

but there were none to be found.

"Shinderslacks!" I ejaculated. "I forGOT! Ubuntu can install from a USB stick!"

And so off I quixoted, heedless to the windmills.

I knew where Ubuntu was installed, of course. But here's the thing: I had forgotten that my drive geometry was way messed up. This is where things get complicated, so if I'm already over your head, grab a joint; you'll need one for this to make sense to you.

I have three drives. These are- well, were- partitioned to hell and gone. One is a solid 250GB single partition; this is where Windows lived and worked. One is partitioned into "Games and Entertainment" and "Storage"; the other was partitioned into "Films and Video" and its remaining 'unallocated space' was being used by Ubuntu 10.04.

With me so far? The Ubuntu system was on one physical drive, and the Windows system was on another physical drive. That turned out to be a Very Big Deal, because the Ubuntu loader (GRUB, I'm looking straight at you) seems to have been, that whole time, residing on the Ubuntu drive!

So I happily plugged Tab A into Slot B and booted to the Ubuntu Live USB stick. Hooray! I'm at the Ubuntu 10.04 Live Desktop! And the whole world glittered with uncollected free gold and uncut gemstones.

Well. Not so much.

I tried to install Ubuntu from the USB stick. Hard. A couple times, in fact, and each time, it failed when it tried to actually install files to the partition Ubuntu 10.04 was on. "Huh," thought I, "I guess I can't do it from a stick. I'll have to go get a DVD to burn later."

"Later" never came. I rebooted my PC and the problems began. It seems that the 10.10 installation of Ubunt from the stick went just far enough to overwrite the master boot record, and since that itself pointed to the Windows 7 bootloader, well... no more Ubuntu, and no Windows. I was stuck, with only boot DVDs for Ubuntu and Windows and a Very Sad Face on my part.

So I booted from the Windows 7 DVD, intending to repair the boot record and burn a proper Ubuntu 10.10 install DVD. But. But! Windows could find nothing to repair, because its bootloader was just fine, thanks. However, for some reason, the system was still defaulting to the Ubuntu bootloader- which happened to exist on another disk entirely, but still pointed to Windows. Even though it was looking for that bootloader, the bootloader was gone.

DERP!

"Okay", I growled, "I'll reinstall Windows." NOT. The registry kept getting corrupted. Diskcheck kept running (or refusing to run). Bluescreens were assaulting me without mercy. The hard drive was making funny noises as the newly-installed Windows 7 OS coughed and died, again and again.

Finally, I gave up, disconnected the 250-GB drive Windows 7 had been on, got rid of any and all Ubuntu partitions I had made, installed Windows 7 to a 90GB partition I had been using as a temp drive, and reconnected the 250-GB former Windows drive. That little beast- a Western Digital drive manufactured in 2005- is now dedicated to programs and games, and Windows 7- the only OS currently installed- resides on the 90GB former temp partition, itself part of a larger physical drive.

What was wrong? No clue (other than messing up partition tables that were already a chaotic mess, perhaps). I ran a disk check on the 250GB drive that had been giving me problems, and all clusters were just fine, thank you. No read/write errors on there, damn it to hell and back- and by that time, I was hoping for a physical error to point my finger at so I could say "your fault! YOUR FAULT!!!". I've had to download upward of 20GB of games from Steam to recover, but thankfully, everything I wanted to keep is still on my other drives, somewhere.

I'll be getting a new 1TB drive soon, I think, and I'll archive everything I want to keep and send it to Mom's to store in her closet. This failure was just too close for comfort!!

Oh- Eight hours to fix this, including three (failed) Win7 installs. I think it's time for a :beer:

[IDemo]

1. A few thougts, and I will probably stand corrected..

Grub or Lilo will park themselves on the mbr of the drive they are being installed to without further instructions. From there, they will 'point' to the bootloaders of other detected OS's. Your interrupted install shouldn't have messed up the partition table of the Windows disk, though, so I'm not sure what occurred there.

What I did back in XP days was to install the Linux bootloader onto the main (Root) partition, then copy it using a DD command and create a file -'boot.lnx' or whatever. This file was placed onto the C drive in Windows and the boot.ini file edited to include it as an option at bootup.

With Win7 or Vista, the process became easier. You still tell the Linux installer to create a bootloader on your root or boot partition. I believe the option comes right after picking a keyboard map, where an innocuous looking little button labeled 'advanced' sits. You then reboot into Windows and run the freeware utility EasyBCD and add a new entry for the Linux installation. Microsoft even recommends this instead of dealing with the text-only BCD edit tool they provide. The only reason I am still doing all this is there is another person in the household who would feel intimidated in dealing with an alien looking Grub menu.

SystemRescueCd can be a good tool for these situations.

[Occulus]

3. well

they will 'point' to the bootloaders of other detected OS's

they did

Your interrupted install shouldn't have messed up the partition table of the Windows disk

it didn't; the Windows bootloader was okay. Well, 'okay' in the sense that Windows Setup diagnostics booting from the DVD couldn't find any problems (or eventually "couldn't repair the existing problem" or some such error message); I was actually hoping running the diagnostics on the DVD would find some corrupted files on the hard drive and replace them. It was, however, sitting right there on the hard drive, intact and waiting for something to point to it the entire time.

The Ubuntu USB install failed and somehow corrupted Grub in the process; as time went by, the messages when booting Windows became more and more dire. Eventually, selecting the Windows entry in the Grub menu at boot time led to a "device not found" error.

Horrible behavior and I still can't figure out what went wrong.

Thanks for the advice. When I get a new drive, I'm backing up everything I have onto it, formatting everything else, and redrawing all the partitions to something sane. I'll try what you suggested when I set everything back up... hopefully for the last time!

[Dont_Bogart_the_Pretzel]

2. I hear ya!

When I tried to upgrade my Ubuntu 10.04 to Ubuntu 10.10 it "lost" my current partitions (500 gig drive). I cancelled and pulled the drive thinking it went bad. It was a good install too.

But I read somewhere about ext4 can get corrupt during install and their is a fix. I put the drive in and booted into a live DVD and ran a script in terminal window...after a lot of "yes" promps and 45 minutes later I was able to boot my old system. I looked at the stuff I had installed and I found out it was only six month old install.

Luckily I have a USB 1T drive with all my keeper stuff on it so nothing was lost... this time.


My next thing to do is to back up my backup!

[Occulus]

4. Well isn't *that* interesting.

Now I wonder just how many people had this exact problem when trying to upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10.