Gather round, ye cyberspace adventurer, and hear my tale of woe. ‘Tis a tale of Windows install CDs, corrupted MFTs, USB memory keys, Minority Report, and far too much “borrowed” Halloween candy.
Let’s start at the beginning, a time called…
Friday Night
I decide that the time has come to replace Linux with Windows fully, for reasons detailed in a previous post. I commence backing up my Linux home directory into a massive .tar.bz2 file on my FAT32 patition
Saturday Morning
I locate some partitioning tools and make sure that the backup file is intact. I then spend several hours trying to get up the nerve to erase the Linux partition.
Saturday Afternoon
I delete the Linux partition, and expand the FAT32 documents partition to take up the extra space. I start backing up personal stuff from the NTFS WinXP partition to the FAT32 partition, so I can reformat the NTFS partition (Windows has been acting up a fair bit) lately.
Reinstalling XP, I want to reformat the partition. I wind up deleting the partition and creating it again, which the Windows installer wants to make a Logical partition (this becomes important later). Install and go.
I start installing software, and convert the FAT32 partition to NTFS for later merging (as is the entire plan). I also notice that the main partition is not a primary partition, and convert it.
Things go downhill from there.
Saturday Evening
Conversion finishes OK, and I notice that the machine no longer boots nicely. Why? Because of my partition changes, the boot.ini file – which lives on the former FAT32 partition – points to the wrong partition for Windows to be on.
Given that Windows is really the only O/S that can write to NTFS partitions, this makes correcting the problem difficult. NOTE TO LONGHORN DEVELOPERS: Putting a text editor in the Windows recovery console would be REALLY helpful.
I figure out that the Windows Recovery console supports USB memory keys. Copy the boot.ini file over to that, edit it on another machine, and copy it back. All is well.
Get into Partition Magic, and set it to merge and walk away as it reboots to do so.
I get back just in time to see Partition Magic dump core, and boot into Windows. I check, and my Documents drive is NOT READABLE.
To be continued.
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