I'll be back . . .

[integr8e]

Sorry I've been quiet lately, I just got a new (refurbished) laptop and I've been plugging around with it the last couple of days. I'm lovin' it What surprises me, is that it came preinstalled with Vista Home Premium, and Kubuntu beats the socks off it! Well, that doesn't really surprise me (Kubuntu's awesome) Anyway, sticking to my used-to-be-and-recently-revived constant, I broke both installations this morning <<<FRIDAY>>> :P So, for the next couple of hours, that's what I'll be working on Shortly, though, I should be back (if I don't break it again - I'm attempting to configure my Vista partition to run in a virtual machine from Kubuntu).

[dibl]

Re: I'll be back . . .

I was worried -- I thought maybe you went and became a Windows user.

[integr8e]

Re: I'll be back . . .

No way man (Linux:Freedom::Windows:bondage)! If you're interested in what I did yesterday, read section 1, if not, skip to section 2

1) I had a hard time figuring out what I'd done wrong. With Vista, I tried following this guide, which instructed me to insert several .sys files from an XP CD into the System32 directory of Vista to get it to boot properly in a VM, which I did. The problem was, they already existed (i.e. override -> override -> override -> override), oops :P Probably needless to say, Windows didn't want to boot after that, so I attempted to use to the recovery partition on my HDD to fix the problem, which didn't know what to do. I then inserted the Vista CD into my PC, rebooted, and told it to repair the problem, which didn't work either; finally, I just booted back into the recovery partition and told it to restore my computer back to the OEM installation, which worked. I was then confronted with another issue, GRUB got borked and was replaced by the Windows MBR! It shouldn't have been much of an issue, but when I booted to my Alt. CD and reinstalled GRUB, it couldn't detect my Windows partition (it would now boot to Kubuntu, but not Vista). I tried manually configuring it, but to no avail. So, I backed up my stuff and reinstalled, which did detect my Windows partition. Thinking I had it in a bag, I tried to boot into Windows, which gave me an error stating there was no winload.exe file in my System32 directory, and to insert the installation CD and repair it that way. I did, but it didn't fix the problem, so I decided to boot back into Kubuntu and manually repair it there. When Kubuntu loaded, I had no GUI - no problem, I'd been there many times before. After reinstalling my Nvidia driver with Envy, however, I still had no GUI; unsuccessfully trying several times, I gave up and decided the problem must be with my kernel, since Envy attempts to tweak the kernel to work with the driver (or something like that). I tried reinstalling it running Envy again, but was left in the same position. After some investigation, I found my /boot partition was not mounted, and that every time I tried to mount it, I received some error message stating the partition was truncated and that ext3 was not supported my kernel, which further supported my theory the problem was with the kernel. As it turned out, somehow my /boot partition had been scrubbed and replaced with a /boot directory (which didn't contain GRUB btw), even though it was listed in my /etc/fstab. After some fileswapping, manipulation, and GRUB reinstallation, I fixed the problem. I then re-ran Envy, which gave me a GUI (cool!) and was good-to-go from there, with Linux anyway. I tried rebooting back to my Windows installation, which gave me the same error message; I inserted the same Windows CD into the same CD drive, clicked the same repair button, from the same menu, but this time, it worked! Yep, that's pretty much what I did yesterday.

2) I'm still in the same position I began with -> attempting to run my Vista partition in a virtual machine, only this time, I have a little more experience (still don't know what I'm doing though, but that's what makes it fun). VMWare Server didn't know what to do with the virtual machine I created, so I'm going to install VMWare Player and see what that does. If anybody has any suggestions, feel free to express yourself -- PLEASE

[integr8e]

Re: I'll be back . . .

I dunno'; since reading this article from CNET.com, I've decided my particular version of Vista can't be run from the hard drive as a virtual machine, so I'm gonna' try to convert it to a virtual disk, and go from there.