So. I installed Linux Mint on this thing. Repartitioned manually first, of course. This time I decided to do the whole "have a separate /home partition in case you don't like the OS" thing. Screwed it up in two ways:
Less annoying way: Made the /home partition too small, not enough room to copy over all my old stuff. :P Oh well -- I can take another day, kill everything and start over. And honestly -- do I really need a separate /home partition now that I have an external, and thus can easily back stuff up if I want to install a different distribution? I think I shouldn't bother with that.
More annoying way: Oops, now I can't boot to Windows! OK, this is much less of an actual problem -- how often am I going to *want* to boot to Windows? -- but more annoying because I have less of an idea how to fix it.
How did this happen? I think because I told it to install GRUB on /dev/sda1 (Windows's boot thingy) rather than on /dev/sda (which is what I did last time, IIRC). Not sure how saying "yeah just put it on /dev/sda" can work, but apparently it does, and what I did doesn't. Well I mean it works perfectly fine, if you don't mind clobbering the Windows boot information.
(When I got this thing, there were 4 partitions: sda1, the boot thingy; sda2, containing Windows; and 2 partitions with some kind of recovery thing, I'm not sure what the difference between them is.)
I can think of several possible solutions to this:
1. Windows can boot fine, GRUB just isn't detecting it for some reason, I just need to add an appropriate custom menu entry. I tried this, actually, but I don't actually know how GRUB2 menu entries work; so I think I copied the wrong things and modified the wrong things, because my custom entry didn't work. Well -- that makes it sound like I'm sure case #1 is true; I'm not. But I'm pretty sure that I did it wrong even if case #1 is false.
2. The computer came with some recovery tool on its own partition. I'd go ahead and run it, but I have little idea just what it actually does and what assumptions it makes and thus whether it will help. I guess I'll call tech support and ask once they're open again.
3. Hey, you know what has a working copy of Windows? My external! (Seeing as it's just my old hard drive, you know.) Nuke the existing Windows partition, and the GRUB installation, and copy over it all from there. Except... would that work? Wouldn't, like, how things are actually positioned on the hard drive matter for boot-related matters?
4. Oh well -- I'm rarely going to want to use Windows anyway. If I really want to, I can boot from the external, because that will work; and I can throw out this copy of it. Well, I assume USB is slower than actually being inside the computer, but I (or someone else) could open the thing up and switch the drives, if it came to that... nothing dictates which of these two has to be which...
Addendum #2: Or "switch the drives" in the sense of copy the external over wholesale and then wipe it, not physically switch them... it'll take longer but won't require getting out any tools...
Addendum: Ugh, I think I can rule out case #1 now...
Addendum #3: Really, this was pretty stupid -- as mentioned above, in this case I didn't really need a separate /home partition, so I didn't really need to repartition manually, and then this problem would have been avoided... also, I'm pretty sure this would be easily solved if they had sent me a Windows CD, but they didn't...
Yet more: Looking it up online says option #2 won't work either. Yuck.
???: Windows wouldn't boot off the external?? Ubuntu booted just fine... maybe I can call them and ask them to send me a Windows CD...
-Harry
Less annoying way: Made the /home partition too small, not enough room to copy over all my old stuff. :P Oh well -- I can take another day, kill everything and start over. And honestly -- do I really need a separate /home partition now that I have an external, and thus can easily back stuff up if I want to install a different distribution? I think I shouldn't bother with that.
More annoying way: Oops, now I can't boot to Windows! OK, this is much less of an actual problem -- how often am I going to *want* to boot to Windows? -- but more annoying because I have less of an idea how to fix it.
How did this happen? I think because I told it to install GRUB on /dev/sda1 (Windows's boot thingy) rather than on /dev/sda (which is what I did last time, IIRC). Not sure how saying "yeah just put it on /dev/sda" can work, but apparently it does, and what I did doesn't. Well I mean it works perfectly fine, if you don't mind clobbering the Windows boot information.
(When I got this thing, there were 4 partitions: sda1, the boot thingy; sda2, containing Windows; and 2 partitions with some kind of recovery thing, I'm not sure what the difference between them is.)
I can think of several possible solutions to this:
1. Windows can boot fine, GRUB just isn't detecting it for some reason, I just need to add an appropriate custom menu entry. I tried this, actually, but I don't actually know how GRUB2 menu entries work; so I think I copied the wrong things and modified the wrong things, because my custom entry didn't work. Well -- that makes it sound like I'm sure case #1 is true; I'm not. But I'm pretty sure that I did it wrong even if case #1 is false.
2. The computer came with some recovery tool on its own partition. I'd go ahead and run it, but I have little idea just what it actually does and what assumptions it makes and thus whether it will help. I guess I'll call tech support and ask once they're open again.
3. Hey, you know what has a working copy of Windows? My external! (Seeing as it's just my old hard drive, you know.) Nuke the existing Windows partition, and the GRUB installation, and copy over it all from there. Except... would that work? Wouldn't, like, how things are actually positioned on the hard drive matter for boot-related matters?
4. Oh well -- I'm rarely going to want to use Windows anyway. If I really want to, I can boot from the external, because that will work; and I can throw out this copy of it. Well, I assume USB is slower than actually being inside the computer, but I (or someone else) could open the thing up and switch the drives, if it came to that... nothing dictates which of these two has to be which...
Addendum #2: Or "switch the drives" in the sense of copy the external over wholesale and then wipe it, not physically switch them... it'll take longer but won't require getting out any tools...
Addendum: Ugh, I think I can rule out case #1 now...
Addendum #3: Really, this was pretty stupid -- as mentioned above, in this case I didn't really need a separate /home partition, so I didn't really need to repartition manually, and then this problem would have been avoided... also, I'm pretty sure this would be easily solved if they had sent me a Windows CD, but they didn't...
Yet more: Looking it up online says option #2 won't work either. Yuck.
???: Windows wouldn't boot off the external?? Ubuntu booted just fine... maybe I can call them and ask them to send me a Windows CD...
-Harry
