Damn you, Windows 7 RC, Damn You!! June 8, 2009
Posted by tumaix in planetkde-tomazcanabrava.trackback
So, Aparrently windows rc is going to be the best windows since …. , well, the best windows version ever, ( don’t know how much that counts, but… ). The hype as on , the wind was changing and the teachers on the university where praising how great microsoft was for the I’msorryforvista version.
Then I got an idea… What if I could install windows side by side with my linux box, and try both, write about the good things, rant about the bad things?
So I borrowed a Win 7 – 64bits version and created a Key on microsoft site ( a new promotion, or so I was told ), cleaned space, and used gparted to create an empty space for my installation. reserved 60gb for win 7.
turned off my linux box, inserted the dvd on the drive. turned the machine on.
oh, cool, it booted. now I just need to format that partition ( click on the 60gb unformatted space ), click on ‘format’, finished formatting, clicked on ‘install’.
“Windows could not be installed on the selected partition, check install log for details”, there wasn’t a install log to check, but that was just the beginning.
I removed the DVD and rebooted, with tears in my eyes and looking after the sunset, trying to get linux up to search for that error on the web.
Grub error 22.
WTF! LOL! WYSIWYG! WINE! GNU! RTFM! and other badwords in acrony.
I was sad, I was desperate. I was, well, sleepy, it was late.
runned for a live cd , found a kubuntu 8.10, booted, ‘fdisk’
Holy Shét, it destroyed my /data/ partition with almost 5.000 songs, *ALL* my university work, my talk for fisl, My homework for Sandro Andrade(mayIgiveittoyouanotherday, prettypleas?!?! ).
Since I didn’t had a linux 64bits at the time, and I already lost my things, I tougth, ‘bleh… gonna install this anyway to see what’s all about’, so, again, installed, formatted the /linux partition ( I already lost my data anyways ),
so, there I was, happly installing my dev tools when suddenly BSOD! a Blue Screen! in less than 2 hours of use! AAAAAAAARGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH! * thorws rotten apples at myself" *
Now I’m downloading mandriva 2009.1 spring to regain my honor.
and yeah, I didn’t had backup.
Live Blue 
when loosing data, there is always PhotoRec: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
implying, that you never ever touch that filesystem in question in write mode.
Just for the record.
thats why you create a backup first or use a virtual machine
Wow. 😦
I was pretty nervous about doing so, but I installed Windows 7 RC1 next to openSUSE 11.1 without any trouble. I had to fix GRUB from the SUSE DVD of course but no trouble yet.
your data was not lost.
only your partition table. very easy to backup with a single dd command.
i’m really sorry 😦
windows is evil
poor old chap!
installed Win7 successfully in VirtualBox running OpenSuse 11.1
Try this way
Christian
Hi Christian, I too tried to install 7 on VirtualBox, but it failed because of some files required by Win7. I’m on Fedora 10. What did you do right and where did I go wrong? I’ll check back, If you can help thanks. Rajii
WOW!!! What the F****! I’m really sorry to read that!
Have you tried to use testdisk or other similar tool in order to try to recover your data?
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
It happened with me once but testdisk saved my day!! and may data…
Good luck to you!
Yeah, from my last install of windows, i think it requires a primary, non logical partition to boot from. So I have 2 windows partitions, a small 50 mb sda2, which serves as a boot partition for windows, right after my linux boot partition, and sda8 for the install partition formatted to 40 GB. In theory, you don’t actually need the boot partition, as Grub can chainload boot any partition you want it to, but the brain dead windows installer doesn’t have a clue as to how to permit this.
If I were you, would be doing the following :
– format everything
– install Windows 7 first ( at least the tragedy would serve for something )
– then install Mandriva 2009.1 Spring
– and use a backup solution 😉 There’s Mandriva ClicknBackup : http://www2.mandriva.com/mdvbackup/
I feel for you… I, too, learnt the value of backups the hard way.
always create a separate partition for /boot and a separate partition where u store ur files “/home/*” for linux by default. that makes recovery easy to just reformat the /boot partition. also i use an old hard drive to backup important documents every month or so. the main thing u should remember tho is that when messing with pre-released software u have to be careful. use a virtual machine or a completely separate hard drive when testing a new operating system
Windows MUST go on the first partition. Install it first. Remember, if it ain’t *nix it doesn’t play well with others. And google for ‘Vantec Nexstar hard drive dock’-perfect to backup large quantities.
Testdisk saved my day on one such occasion..
Ofcourse after that I use free online backup service – spideroak to store my crucial data.
use foremost, http://foremost.sourceforge.net/
Never write new data to a damaged partition, boot off from a live linux CD, mount an external hard drive (to store the files about to recover), and run foremost against the messed partition!! If you are lucky enough to mount the partition, mount it read-only!
You may be able to recover some data, use foremost!
I think that W7 destroyed your MBR, just the grub part, any good linux distro (my loved openSUSE does it very well) will recognize there is an installation (or more than one installation) and will let you boot it off, then you can always do a grub reinstall.
Hope you recover your precious data, good luck.
antx.
While that does suck, it’s pretty idiotic to mess around with partitions when you have important unbacked-up data on the drive! There’s always a massive risk something will go wrong and you’ll lose all your data.
There’s really not much I can say that hasn’t already been said. _Always always always_ do a backup when installing OSes, even if they’re friendly *nixes.
My girlfriend’s computer had Windows Vista and a Wubi install of Ubuntu when we upgraded Vista to Windows 7 and I still backed up EVERYTHING important in both OSes. The install went fine though, and the Wubi install was even still fully intact (probably because it uses MS’ bootloader).
Aside from all that though, Windows 7 does seem like a pretty good version of Windows. Possibly the best, but I’ve not used them all enough to be sure.
Everytime I install Windows, I install it first if on same drive. Or then if using other drive, I take the other drive out so Windows can not remove something. Too many times Selected the empty partition to install and Windows wipes out all partitions. Dunno why it does it but quess is, it does not like at all other than FAT32 or NTFS partitions.
Just always have a backups, at least from your personal files. Then nothing is problem, unless your original files get destroyed, then your backups turns to be originals 😉
I tested Winodws 7 on VirtualBox 😦 Sorry to hear what happened. I myself have recently been starting to do backups.
@Rolandl: No, you can install Windows 7 pretty much anywhere. It’s running on sdd4 here.
Also, I didn’t have any problems installing or running Windows 7 so far. It’s pretty neat actually. Of course, it just killed my bootsector and I had to restore it booting from a Live-CD, but that was expected, really.
You sir, you don’t know how to install Windows after installing Linux. Remember that Windows need a primary partition and after the instalation, reinstall GRUB or use the Windows’s boot manager (with bcdedit.exe or EasyBCD).
There are a lot of users that could install Windows 7 and never have a BSOD. You sir, you don’t know how to install Windows.
Probably you are right, the last version of windows I have used was Windows Millenium, a long long time ago.
didn’t know that it still sucked like this, messing with partition tables that doesn’t belongs to him.
Windows installers were always terrible. XP will happily reorder your partitions when you delete one from the middle… breaks software raid like no other thing. This alone cost me a few days of my time on learning how to manually hexedit the contents of my partition table.
Vista just complains about not being able to install, where the XP one at least gives you a hint about why it’s not able to install (primary partition only… laughable). An then it’s very easy to screw up your partitions because they’re just icons…
ICONS! UGLY *PIXELLATED* ICONS! With VERY LACKING DESCRIPTIONS!! *NONE* of the filesystems I use are recognized or accessible! There are NO labels – It’s very funny when you have five partitions with the same size! Let’s play the russian roulette with important data… Throw in an off-by-one bug and you might just as well smash the harddrive with a hammer.
The rewriting of bootloaders and the MBR is just plain EVIL.
tl;dr: I’ve had my share of bad run-ins with windows installers. They suck. All of them.
You could probably have ran fdisk and recreated your lost partition pretty easily. You should not have been so hasty in destroying all hope
A lost partition table does not equate to lost data.
Iah, I know, the one thing that made me do it was, well, music and videos are recoverable, and I had a university thing to deliver today, and I didn’t had a linux dvd to install
My rule: never, ever, never ever, run a Microsoft product OUTSIDE a virtual environment. I don’t care how “good” or “perfect” or “wonderful” it is supposed to be – virtual boxes are your friends.
Only two OS’s I run on bare machines – OS X and Linux (Kubuntu). Everything else does in a virtual machine.
Life is easier and when I want to move to a new system, it is a piece of cake.
WIndows does not work and play well with others. When you install Windows, it will wipe every other OS from the drive. (It’s that sense of entitlement and monopoly–surely nobody would want some other inferior OS on this system if Windows is being installed, MS thinks.) That’s why, whenever you set up a dual boot Windows/something else system, you install Windows _first_.
Backup is your friend.
If I ever install windows in a dual boot situation I always install it on a *separate* physical hard drive and unplug the Linux drive during the install. I learned that the hard way too! So I feel for ya. Windows has no clue other operating systems even exist and I doubt it ever will.
What an excellent way to learn why to do backups!
My first real worry with Linux is I did not see an easy “system backup” and “system restore” like I learned the hard way was needed in Windows. I now boot to sda6 and use
“cp -a /mnt/sda7/* /ExtDrive/Backup/sda7/”
to backup the OS. I use a separate partition for /Data/{Music, Images}.
I installed Win7 in a VM (VirtualBox from Sun) so as to not encounter the issues you suffered. Much safer, and very easy to get rid of when the RC expires.
HTH,
[…] Damn you, Windows 7 RC, Damn You!! so, there I was, happly installing my dev tools when suddenly BSOD! a Blue Screen! in less than 2 hours of use! AAAAAAAARGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH! * thorws rotten apples at myself” * […]
You sir, are a moron.
Oh, yes. and windows installer is too.
Advice: DO backups!!
yeah, microsoft and partitioning, some big mysteries…
i did a partition for vista in linux, but as vista wouldn’t want to install on it, i recreated that partition in the vista installer, all seemed to work, but look what it made to my partition tabel:
Unusable 1.05*
sda1 Boot Primary NTFS [] 150019.77*
Unusable 0.07*
WTF ?
[…] read the rest here.. admin 9 June 2009 I dont know, Windows 7, Windows Home Server Windows 7 1 views Forst beer Coca-Cola celebrates 123th anniversary of printed advertising […]
I’m sure you’ve already head, repeatedly, to do backups. I learned after fumbling with resizing ext4 partitions that the MBR != Disk (fortunately,I didn’t lose any data).
what? you allowed windows mess with your partition table and just gave up, not even trying ANY of the available recovery methods/boot disks? And now you blame Windows?
I agree with the other comment: you are a moron and deserved the loss of your data.
You should rewrite your text and admit your double stupidity: no backups and absolute ignorance of partition/boot sector recovery.
I don’t blame windows for my loss of data, I blame it for messing up my partition table when I didn’t asked it do install or do anything.
and, I didn’t had *ANY* recovery method or linux live cd’s at the time ( just got one the day after. )
hmmm…
As a few people have stated before, the real problem is that the writter has little to no knowledge of how a computer works.
Having / and /home seperated is a MUST. having another /boot partition is a good advice.
Windows was always rewriting the MBR (Master Boot Record) so there is no suprise that you could not start grub/lilo after installing windows. that can be fixed by putting any linux live cd and reinstalling grub/lilo in the MBR.
Windows deleted your data… not really, it just screwed with the MBR, that you can reverse with gparted.
ps: learn how to use irc! If you go in any linux channel (for example #ubuntu on freenode), someone would have helped you solve your problems and you wouldn’t have lost your data.
I hate linux (and windows), when n00bs can wheel.
ps: if you want to learn linux the fast way, install gentoo!
yes, I do agree that I don’t have knowledge of installing windows,. but the installation dvd shoudn’t mess with my disk *before* I ask it to.
well, I do know liunx, but I also didn’t have any disk to recover my partition.
it’s actually a good experiment to try how understadable the ‘community’ is ( if *any* people that puts a dvd, boot it, choose to not install and reboot to enter on it’s choosen os, if it cant, the user is a moron. , yay capitalism. )
All of this is entirely your own fault. You chose not to make a backup before messing with important partitions. who is to say that reallocating hard drive space was not the cause of the data loss. This could have happened before you even put the Windows 7 disk in your drive. Did you check?
Second, you can not complain about bugs in pre release software. Also most problems in Vista and other versions of windows are people. People break operating systems.
I didn’t messed up with partitions, I just booted the dvd and then I had this.
…and u pay some for that Win?
this guy don’t know about partitions and grub
if you read the other comments, you could see that I didn’t had a linux live cd to recover the partition.
and, no, I don’t know a lot about it.
Same thing happened to me also..
and FYI, you can recover the partition and the data, if it is just a partition table mess up! but, if Windows has overwritten the data content, you can not do any thing other than blaming yourself.
wow…you guy’s are really harsh….he came here looking for help….and got crapped on!
I came here looking for help….but I’ll be damned if I’ll ask the likes of you!
Sometimes the ‘community’ didn’t get enougth love in the childhood. 😉