[wellylug] I blew it - lost a convert

[Eugene Van Wyk]

BTW

I have a Win 98 bootdisk, which I have used a few times to recover from
a crashed system like this, using fdisk/mbr.  I have never used that on
XP however.

Eugene van Wyk
Test Development Engineer
4RF Communications Ltd
26 Glover St
Ngauranga
Wellington
New  Zealand
 

-----Original Message-----
From: wellylug-admin at lists.wellylug.org.nz
[mailto:wellylug-admin at lists.wellylug.org.nz] On Behalf Of John C
Barstow
Sent: Tuesday, 31 August 2004 10:39 p.m.
To: Wellylug
Subject: [wellylug] I blew it - lost a convert

So, I've agreed to help a friend de-gunk their Windows box; and casually
mention that if they had Linux they wouldn't have this problem. They're
willing to give a go after I evangelize it, and lend me the box to set a
dual boot environment.

I grab a copy of Mandrake 10 from Disk Smith, reasoning that it's a good
first distro and requires me to spend 0 minutes burning. A few clicks
later, and we have a brand-new install.  Windows side is run through a
few good cleaning cycles, Mozilla and OpenOffice are installed, and
there is much rejoicing.

They bring it home and decide to put in that new Radeon they've been
meaning to get installed. Figure they'll boot it up and get the "new
drivers installing" screen they're used to in Windows.

Nothing works. It has been a total of two hours since I handed the
machine to them, and I get a phone call.

I attempt to boot into windows. System just sits there, not doing
anything. Booting into Mandrake fails - turns out they got prompted
about multihead support and hit the cancel button; presumably X is
misconfigured now, pointing at (unused and unsupported) on-board video.

My first priority is to make sure they can get into their familiar
Windows side; I can always revisit Linux configuration later.
Using the Mandrake installation CD, I check out the rescue menu and get
a nice option - "Restore the Windows bootloader". That'll do it, I
think.

Wrong. Now the machine doesn't boot.  Oops, maybe the bootloader got
corrupted somehow.  Grab the XP install disc, drop into rescue mode.
Had a small panic when nobody knew the admin password; then remembered
this was Windows. It was blank, of course.
Now, I run FIXMBR. This should give me a nice, clean Windows bootloader.
MBR writes to disk, claims success, sign of relief.

Machine still doesn't boot. Is there something wrong with hard drive? I
run Mandrake rescue, install linux bootloader into MBR.  Boots nicely
(not into Windows, of course). That is to say, it finds LILO just fine
and boots into linux without problem.

Run FIXMBR again, as well as FIXBOOT. Claims of success, no joy.

So the result of all this hard work is that they ended up with a machine
that boots into text-mode linux.  Obviously with some work I could get X
configured properly, but from their perspective I screwed their machine
and they will end up reinstalling XP. Luckily they don't blame me
personally and may even be willing to give Linux another go once their
new hardware is playing nicely with Windows.

But this is frustrating. Reasonably well-supported hardware, good
install experience, couple of handy test boots, but such pain when I
hand the machine back to the user. It's not fair. And what the $@#% is
wrong with XP that I can't restore the bootloader? I've never had a
problem on any other machine. Single hard drive, Windows partition right
up front where no bootloader should have any trouble whatsoever. Rescue
disk even sees all the files!

Argh!


-- 
Wellington Linux Users Group Mailing List:
wellylug at lists.wellylug.org.nz
To Leave:  http://lists.wellylug.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/wellylug