8.04 dual-boot w/ XP: - installation problems

[Eberhard Roloff]

Eberhard Roloff schrieb:
> Alec Ross schrieb:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've just installed 8.04 from a DVD.  I wanted to get a dual boot with 
>> an existing XP installation.
>>
>> During the (default) partitioning, I had an error reporting that some 
>> data could not be written back to disk.
>>
>> I went back to the previous page, and re-tried.  This time no failure 
>> was reported.
>>
>> However, on booting, and entering grub, the only OSs listed are Ubuntu:
>>
>>     8.04 Kernel 2.6 ...
>>     "                      (recovery ...
>>     ", memtest86+
>>
>>
>> Is this showing that the earlier error has lost my XP partition?  What, 
>> if anything, might I do to attempt recovery?
>>
> First of all, you should check whether your XP partitions still exist 
> (or not).
> Either use a CD-Boot Disk, ex. damssmalllinux, Ubuntu, Knoppix, RIP 
> Linux (recovery is possible Linux) ...
> or, you use your existing ubuntu and use a commandline, then ex.
> sudo cfdisk /dev/sda , asuming that your disk in question is /dev/sda.
> 
> This will show you, what partitions are seen on that disk. XP partions 
> are usually labelled as "ntfs" or, very rare nowadays, "fat32", "vfat" 
> (or similar).
> 
> gparted will do, as well.
> 
I forgot:
If this is successful and you can "see" your windows data, I would 
strongly recommend to begin with backing up anthing valueable to an 
external device or to your existing linux. This is simply because "you 
never know".

Linux is very good in reading (and writing with ntfs3G) to ntfs, so 
that will be no problem. Actually I do it all the time , when 
customers mess up having forgotten to backup before...

regards
EbR