Endless Paradigm

Well, I tried installing Ubuntu 7.04 last night.  After inserting the CD, it seems to run as a LiveCD O_o - didn't know that.
Well, it's the first LiveCD that seems to work on my SATA CD drive.  Anyway, I have a nV RAID0 setup, however, when starting the installer, and when it asks for which partition to install on, I quickly noticed only two separate SATA drives showing up.  Seeing that it didn't detect my RAID configuration, I quickly exited.

Interestingly, after rebooting, it seems that my harddrive's bootsector died.
I had the exact same problem when trying to install Fedora Core 4 before (it loads nV SATA, but not nV RAID; FC5 installed fine however).  What I don't get is how it screws up your boot loader when you haven't even selected a partition or anything...

Since I had a Vista x64 installation still on the HDD, I used the Vista CD to try and restore the bootloader - worked, but only recovered the Vista one.  Gah, I'll have to connect my floppy drive so I can use the XP CD to restore the XP boot loader.


But...  I still don't get why the Linux installer would screw up the boot partition (it also corrupted a number of files on the primary partition - I'm glad I set up the primary partition (C: drive) to be a 2GB FAT drive only used to store boot loader and swap file), even when it's not supposed to be writing anything ...

damn!

That's actually a problem with any OS as your running a software RAID set-up (remember how winXP needs the extra drivers at start-up? Same thing)

There are alot of issues with this set-up and you need very specific drivers, but the answer will be in the ubuntu forums, just make sure the solution you use is for your chipset version, etc.

well wow ur lucky u didnt completely loose ur data

...he was never in danger of losing his data, boot sector ≠ the entire HDD.

UncertainGod Wrote:That's actually a problem with any OS as your running a software RAID set-up (remember how winXP needs the extra drivers at start-up? Same thing)

Actually no.  Without a driver, XP won't recognize the disk at all.
Ubuntu recognizes it wrongly, and not only that, it writes something to it when I haven't even told it to do anything....

UncertainGod Wrote:...he was never in danger of losing his data, boot sector ≠ the entire HDD.

Actually, my entire boot partition got corrupted.  I had to format it.  That's why I'm glad I made a separate partition for holding the boot loader.
(So I didn't loose anything, but I had to do a separate temporary install of XP to get NTLDR back)

AHHHHH thanks zinga u problem solved my issue when i dual booted my boot manager fudgeed up and then my vista became unregisterd (i still ent solved that)

I think the reason why ur files became corrupted is that the MBT has been written to, not just the bootsector. I remember a time, though, where the first LiveCD's would actually BACKUP the MBT to RAM, COMPLETELY re-write it in order to 'trick' the system to load an OS from a CD that is pretending to be a fixed disk, then after the mere 1 second of that process it would load part of the kernal into RAM and restore the original MBT... i rememberd this dangerous feature when i tried a Linux Live CD may years ago and had "Write-Protect Boot Sector" EnABLED in my BIOS (which usually protects the whole MBT)... and to my alarm i received a big-arse warning about an attempt to edit my bootsector when loading a LiveCD. Researching gave me this info, but i don't think this is the case anymore - Linux is a bit less dodgy with it now (as i said, it was apparently one of the first LiveCD's or something).

Anyway, ive had many problems with MBT/Bootsector corruption. I had many problems setting up with my.. "quint"-boot of MS-DOS 6.22, Win98SE, WinXP, Win-VI and Fedora on my PC. My solution? I have a 200MB partition at the beginning of my first HDD, primary and active, that holds DOS and the Win98/XP/Vista boot data as well. GRUB is installed with Linux on my second HDD, and the Vista Bootloader on the 200MB part. (which i use as my primary boot loader/menu) has an entry that points to GRUB.

If my boot data ever becomes corrupted, i have an easy solution, rather than mssing around trying to fix it when I'm probably making it worse. As well as my Vista and "Personal Files" partitions, i use Acronis True Image found on HirenCD (v9.2 i have) to make an image of my 200MB partition. If anything goes wrong, i boot up Hiren from the CD, load Acronis, and restore the image from my hidden partition at the end of my third HDD. It kewl cause it can read NTFS and FAT partitions, even when they are 'unknown' or 'bad' accordig to the MBT (a hardware method of marking a partition 'hidden' or 'corrupted' respectively).

Oh, i also have HirenCD 9.2 on my DOS partition so i don't have to load the damn CD whenever i want to make an incremental partition backup. To those who are interested or do already do regular partition backups, i highly recommend HirenCD (freeware, or donationware which i think is the same thing) if you have never used or heard of it. I also recommend Acronus True Image which is on Hiren9.2, in my experience it is faster and a bit more friendly than Ghost. It also has a great 'incremental' backup of partitions, and fantastic optional compression which is pretty fast.

- EasyBCD
     Used to edit the Vista BCD (bootloader). Supports adding entries for XP, DOS (sort of), Linux, and even MacOSX for those haxx0rs out there runing MacOS on their Intel (and now AMD is compatible) PC's.

- Hiren's Boot CD
     A fantastic diagnostic and utility bootable CD - including the best of repair and testing tools you can find!


That's my two cents. And no I'm not advertising, they are both freeware. And i love them. Just trying to share the gossip. Lawl.


P.S. - I used to never use image backups. For many years. I started using then a few months ago, now i can't live without them haha.

Thanks for the tip bboy_sonik!

I'm lucky to have a simple setup though - so reinstalling XP to a temporary partition will reinstall the bootloader for me XD

Once i installed XP AFTER Vista too, and had said problem of XP replacing the Vista Bootloader, i used Vista CD to recover boot loader. This is fine if you used Vista as your primary bootloader - when i did it this is what happened. It restored the Vista boot sector, added a "Vista (Recovered)" entry to the OS list, and all the original BCD entries were still there (including the old Vista one, and XP).

It worked fine for me once. But on another attempt, it changed my Vista drive from C to I or H or some poo poo... so when i started the 'Recovered' Vista i had invalid registry entires and whatnot pointing to C drive (when it had beenchanged to I) and so once i logged in everything failed to load, including explorer.exe lol.

After that happened to me, that when i took the above process into practice. As far as i see it, if you have a scenario like this below, you can't go wrong. And partition backup/restore is easy to keep the system safe.

HDD0-PART0 - DOS (FAT16), Primary, Active. With Vista bootloader present.
HDD0-PART1 - Vista NTFS.
HDD0-PART2 - XP NTFS.
HDD1-PARTX - GRUB, Linux, MacOSX, etc. The key is keeping GRUB on a completely seperate HDD than Micro$oft OS's!
HDD2-PARTX - Storage, games, etc. as NTFS. A not-so-big partition after, set as FAT32 (more compatible) with MacOSX and Linux related storage things (to easily share things between all OS's, as MacOSX can read FAT32 easily).


If you ever do a completely fresh install, i highly recommend this! My favorite part is having Hiren9.2 installed on the DOS partition - it's so grand.

P.S. Sorry about not replying on thread (http://endlessparadigm.com/forum/showthr...?tid=4452) yet Zinga, still researching your wise comments...!

EDIT: I had to use the 'Recovered' vista entry as i found out the Linux installer completely re-arranged my partition table! When i install Linux or Vista, i PHYSICALLY REMOVE my XP/Vista drive and install Linux on the second HDD with GRUB, then put the MS HDD back in and add a pointer to GRUB in the Vista boot menu :)

I think i repeated myself a damn lot there. My bad.