Kubuntu hoses Windows on HP Pavilion A810n

[manchicken]

On Wednesday 01 August 2007 00:09:47 Douglas Phillipson wrote:
> Greg Booth wrote:
> > On Tuesday 31 July 2007 9:03:02 pm Douglas Phillipson wrote:
> >>>> Not good, have you booted up the live disc and taken a look at the
> >>>> partition table there to see what's up ?
> >>>
> >>> I used BootItNG to resize the NTFS partition.  There is a 7mb Fat32
> >>> partition.  I installed Kubuntu, it booted fine but Windows would not
> >>> boot.  Then I just tried to reset the MBR with BootItNG, which I have
> >>> done a dozen imes before on other PC's, and it restored Windows fully,
> >>> but not now.  Even the (F10) Restore System key doesn't work.  Has it
> >>> now become dangerous to install Linux?
> >>>
> >>> Doug P
> >>
> >> Adn of course you no longer get recovery CD's anymore.  I have installed
> >> dozens of Kubuntu systems safely in the past, My level of confidence
> >> that I would not hose someones Windows installation has now been
> >> shattered!
> >>
> >> Doug P
> >
> > Well, you lost me at "resized ntfs partition" that's not something I've
> > ever done. I've ghosted to a file, reformatted then ghosted back to the
> > new partition, but never just resized on the fly.
> >
> > Greg
>
> So I had to go buy WinXP. Arrrg!  I hate giving money to Microsoft!  I
> had to look several places for XP because some only sold Vista!  What a
> racket! I deleted  the fat32 HP partition on the HD, installed XP and
> Kubuntu.  Everything works now but I lost all my nephew's games. (It
> wasn't my computer).
>
> Any Ideal why HP's partition scheme would not run Windows after a
> Kubuntu install?
>
> Doug P

HP's partition scheme is built upon the windows bootloader.  Kill the windows 
bootloader (say, with grub), kill the restore partition.  I found that 
supergrub can let you access it again, but that it's a pain to get it back.

When blaming Kubuntu, remember that NTFS is a bit of an exception case.  It's 
a filesystem that is regularly fragmented, and you used a program I've never 
heard of to resize the partition.

Granted I've ever set up a dual-boot once (and it was with a vista machine, 
and that did not turn out well), I've noticed that this is one of the 
pain-points for most folks installing GNU/Linux operating systems.

I just never saw the value in keeping windows installed I suppose.

-- 
~ manchicken <><
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)nfluence with large hammer.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0


Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html