I did try several Linux distributions and did this process at least 10 times
and I never lost my Vista partition. I always partition unused space and
install Linux, then verify that everything is working and as a last step
update boot sector on the partition for Linux. Then I dump boot information
(512 bytes) and copy it to C: drive as linux.bin. Then I add bcd record so
that I could use original Vista boot loader and it's menu to start by
default Vista or select Linux. This time however as an "expert" I was a
little bit quick in setting this up and mistyped partition number. I thought
I can quickly fix it by Vista DVD and running bootsect or bootrec, but I
ended up in this situation.
Hard disk works perfectly no errors, memory test does not detect anything.
C: drive with Vista seems to be untouched. When I was running from Vista DVD
I ran checkdisk and there was no error. "Startup repair" detected that I
have C: volume with Vista. I went as far as checking MBR for disk signature,
I checked if partition 1 has correct offsets (1MB) and everything looks
good.
I was able to copy all my data to USB portable drive. The only problem is
that some files and folders are not accessible this way. Many applications
store their data in \Users\<user>\... There are configurations I need as
well as all sorts of junk and temporary files. Many things are also stored
in registry so if you reinstall, you have to reinstall each application to
update registry. This is really a bad design. I don't know who came up with
the idea of Temp files, Temporary Internet files, Thumbnails and other work
data merged with configurations and saved projects in one place. You cannot
simply backup one folder. Backing up the whole hard drive takes several
hours and cannot be done on daily basis. I myself use external USB drive for
all multimedia content, like DVDs because this way I don't lose it, if I
need to reinstall OS and repartition hard drive. For all other stuff I have
C:\Projects and C:\Temp. I need only to copy Projects folder to my USB drive
and backup is done in a few minutes. But I'm not sure if I can simply copy
Windows Live Mail database and then restore it on a clean system if I didn't
export it as one file. The same problem is with IE configuration as I use
very tight security settings, Skype settings etc. I cannot export these and
extract configurations one by one or backup the whole hard drive every time
I do something with my computer (and that is almost every day). How nice
would it be if for example Visual Studio didn't update any registry settings
and any plugins and SDKs were simply in one subfolder. IE could have all
plugins/activex in a subfolder etc.
It would be nice to have
C:\Temp - used by default by all applications
C:\Configuration\<username> - used by default by all apps for user specific
C:\Configuration\public
C:\Configuration\system - for storing user accounts and security settings so
that I could tell new OS could easily restore
C:\UserData\<username> - for documents and other data created by user
C:\Media - for pictures, videos, music (these are usually large files, we
don't need to backup these regularly or not at all)
This way I could simply reinstall OS into Windows folder, update boot sector
and that's all. Registry would be used only for OS settings, to setup
debugging, appverifier etc. The worst case scenario would be repartitioning
hard drive, installing OS and applications and simply copy Configuration and
UserData folders. No manual setup of applications would be necessary.
Now I will have to start from scratch. Installing OS and apps isn't so bad.
Setting up apps is what makes it so tedious. ALl these usernames, passwords,
ftp settings, bookmarks, mail accounts .....
I wanted to try Ubuntu Studio 9.10 because it is supposed to have real time
kernel. So far it works nicely and is really really fast. My machine is a
tablet with Core2Duo 2.4GHz, 4 GB RAM and Vista Ultimate x64. Vista is a
little bit slower, for example it boots up in 8 minutes with many services
disabled (used to be up to 15 minutes before I could start using the
machine), while Ubuntu takes 40 to 50 seconds (almost faster than waking up
Vista from sleep mode
. Playing content on Hulu is somehow smoother and
even scripts in msnbc player are much faster than on Vista in Chrome (IE is
even slower). I installed Java Runtime and websites which use it to create
UI are much much much faster. On Vista you see data grid redrawing each cell
and refreshing, but on Ubuntu it show up quickly as if it was one bitmap. On
the other hand setting up bluetooth mouse and WiFi is too much pain. Also
tablet feature doesn't quite work on extended desktop. Moving pen over
tablet's screen causes cursor to move all the way to the external monitor
and that's pretty useless. I use pen with graphics editor, so that's
something I'd like to have.
If I could only save Vista. I still cannot live without it. I'm thinking if
upgrade to Windows 7 would help. Maybe it would fix boot records.
