Disk partition problems and my bad expirience with winxp

[Gediminas2]

Hello everyone!

Something like a month ago I was at my cousin's (he's 11) and installed Linux (Kubuntu 7.04) on his machine. In fact this was after windows xp caught many viruses and became almost unusable.
My cousin was happy with his Kubuntu and the only thing that wasn't working out of box was the printer (but that's another story).

But his parents were not happy with Linux. They demanded to install windows on the machine, as they could not work with it (actually I doubt that). For example, OpenOffice.org could not deal with excel macros and some of their programs couldn't be installed with wine.

So when I visited them this Saturday I helped my cousin install windows xp. It was a pain... More a hell...

So I inserted the disk, the setup was loading ~5 minutes and when it scanned the drives(prior install)
It said "restart the computer". So again the setups loads, blah blah, since there was a NTFS partition we chose it and let the setup install (we didn't format the drive). It took more than a hour (just to copy files rom a CD !?). When it finished, nothing loads. Windows setup failed, no boot options to boot Linux (I didn't bring any CD because that was not the reason I visited my cousin). This was very sad, but we hoped that not everything was lost. There was no way back. Again we started the setup this time formatting the NTFS partition. After setup, reboot and ~30 minutes of extended setup that was installing something...

After all this the first boot to windows... No sound. Poor Graphics driver. Actually absolutely nothing...
And then I found out that my cousin has no driver CDs. The person who sold him the computer didn't give any driver CD for anything. Can't blame my cousin, he didn't know. When he bought the computer win Xp was installed and working. So now to find the drivers in the internet... So now to get the hardware information. The question where. It seems windows doesn't have such tools as Linux does. So we need to get software to identify the hardware in the internet.

Now this was not a simple "sudo pppoeconf" and adding username and password. No. We tried to connect to the internet and found out that there were no Network card drivers... This seemed like a chicken and an egg question: To get internet working we needed drivers, to get drivers we needed internet... Fortunately my cousins father had internet in his mobile phone, we connected to internet with it. Now to get drivers, but first of all, to get software to tell what drivers we need. From google I found out "Sisoft sandra"(something like that) can do that, after a hour downloading we installed it. Now we ran it and the computer froze. After rebooting, and a nearly hour (!!!) of scanning the hardware we got the name of the motherboard. After about 5 minutes of searching in google we found the driver for chipset. After installing it and rebooting we found out that it does nothing. So we again searched for LAN driver this time. and after installing it network started working.

Graphics driver was the easiest to find (nvidia.com), the printer had the driver CD, so not a problem.
So after ~ 6 hours we had windows. It had nothing... I had to install antivirus, office, nero, software to read from ext2 partition... I failed to get a working driver for the sound card(integrated).

After all was done we started downloading Kubuntu ISo image. After burning it, we booted to the liveCD , installed gparted to resize the partition (I wanted to make separate "/" and "/home" partitions) and when gparted showed me that the whole disk was "unallocated". This was bad.Very bad. Windows destroyed the partition structure. I could mount /dev/sda2 to see files, but that's it. Linux was not installed for dual boot. I didn't want go go again with the pain installing windows ever again.
So my cousin is left with windows and no sound.

Now I want to ask, could the partitions had been possible to repair without loosing any data?

P.S. If anyone can prove me that windows is more out-of-box than Linux (Kubuntu in this case), he can be the first to throw a stone at me.

[Fintan]

Re: Disk partition problems and my bad expirience with winxp

I am trying very hard not be be cheeky and smile but what you described is par for course. Of course you are not done yet. You need a firewall quick, very quick. An anti spy/malware program and of course have your anti everything software update every hour or so just to keep on top of things. Not to mention doing a anti-everything scan at least once a day.
My experience with reinstalling xp shows that the average life of a new xp install without a firewall on the net is about 15 min. before it gets infested with some sh....t.

Now I want to ask, could the partitions had been possible to repair without loosing any data?

basically yes. You could have used gparted live or partiton magic cd to setup your partitions before installing winxp.

I would copy those files you need (sda2?) onto a dvd and reinstall kubunt with grub in mbr (dual boot) so your cousin can use linux and his parents can stick with windows. When you do this set up a separate fat32 partition, apart from /home, /swap and /, for files that are shared files between win and linux.

Good luck and congrats to your cousin for his good taste

[Gediminas2]

Re: Disk partition problems and my bad expirience with winxp

the partitions were fine BEFORE windows setup.

basically yes. You could have used gparted live or partiton magic cd to setup your partitions before installing winxp.

The question is can i do something NOW? There is only one physical hard drive. And windows made a mess out of it. there are 3 partitions (windows NTFS, Ext2 and swap), but gparted shows NO partitions(like a new not formatted drive)

Since my cousin lives ~100 km away from me and September is coming I won't visit him very soon. But I want to know in case I visit him.

[dibl]

Re: Disk partition problems and my bad expirience with winxp

but gparted shows NO partitions(like a new not formatted drive)

This is bad -- very bad. If GParted says there are no partitions on your hard drive, then probably there are no partitions on your hard drive .... you could boot your Windows CD and see if fdisk agrees with GParted -- I'll speculate that it will.

If you have to start over, go ahead and install Win XP first, but while you're at it make the Win XP partition the size you actually want it, so GParted will be able to see that partition and you won't need to change the size of it. Using GParted, make 3 more primary partitions in the space not used by Win XP, one each for /, /home, and swap, and then boot your Kubuntu Alternate Install CD and use guided installation to select the mount points as you made them. 6 or 7 GB is sufficient for /, 0.5GB is sufficient for swap, and the rest can be for /home where your data will live.

One more recommendation -- use ext3, not ext2, for your Linux filesystem type ("/" and "/home" partitions).

[Gediminas2]

Re: Disk partition problems and my bad expirience with winxp

I see I don't sound clear.
Windows is installed, but I won't try to install them again. Windows hates me.

There were (before windows setup) these partitions :

/dev/sda1 -- ???
/dev/sda2 -- windows NTFS (from older windows installation, second drive containing documents)
/dev/sda5 -- Linux "/" (ext2)
/dev/sda6 -- Linux swap

now when I installed windows, there was no boot options for Linux. (windows was installed on the partition /dev/sda2)

When in Kubuntu 7.04 live CD, gparted shows no partitions, the console shows :errorverlapping partitions(I just remembered it, but I might have made a mistake).

But i can mount both /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda5

Perhaps it is this "overlapping partitions" fault, but I don't know if I recalled the error correctly.

[dibl]

Re: Disk partition problems and my bad expirience with winxp

POSSIBLY the latest version of the GParted Live CD might have a better ability to "see" that drive than the GParted version that is in the Kubuntu Live CD. Get the ISO here:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

[Fintan]

Re: Disk partition problems and my bad expirience with winxp

@dible: yeah that could work. But I have noticed that win based partitioners (partition magic, etc) are a little more lenient as far as HD corruption goes.
Whereas gparted is very strict.

@gediminas: When you do go out there nest why not just copy all relevant (important) files if any to a DVD using gparted live (new version) to delete all non windows partitions. Then set up a fat23 partition for sharing between win (I don't trust those windows linux partition readers) and linux, then create /swap, /home, / partitons. Install kubuntu as usual(best use the alt CD) with grub in mbr as dual boot.

Just my 2.5 c's