[ale] Linux install breaking windows?

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

On 2/8/2012 6:12 PM, mike at trausch.us wrote:
> On 02/08/2012 06:02 PM, Greg Clifton wrote:
>    
>> But no, seriously, what Jim said. Fsck won't help the Windows side, will
>> it? So they probably should run scan disk on the Windows partition
>> if/when they get it back up just in case there is a bad section on the
>> hard drive. That should flag the bad section and move the data, if it's
>> not too far gone already.
>>      
> Scandisk is so 1990s!  ;-)
>
> Seriously, these days it's just CHKDSK; specifically, on the system
> volume you can only run that at boot time, so you have to run it after
> the system has been booted, tell it to check C: and fix errors, and it
> will ask you if you want to schedule a boot-time CHKDSK run.  Say yes,
> reboot, wait and see what happens...
>
> In a real pinch, for WinXP one can use BartPE to run CHKDSK manually on
> the partition, and for Windows Vista or 7 one can use the install media
> to boot into a recovery environment that has a CMD.EXE shell.  (Only
> took them eleventyone years to figure out just how useful that could be...)
>
> 	--- Mike
>
>    
The first thing I'd do to this machine is to boot a standalone CD of a 
backup program like Acronis TrueImage or whatever else.  Backup the NTFS 
partition if you can get it to read.  That will at least preserve the 
user's data.  If the standard backup fails, he could try a sector by 
sector copy.  Then, if I had a choice, I would run SpinRite from Gibson 
Research ( http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm ).  The program can be 
purchased and if it is not helpful or satisfactory, the user can get his 
money back within 30 days.  There are a number of things which could 
screw up the NTFS partition which have nothing to do with Linux, just as 
they can screw up a pc which is running only Windows with no Linux at 
all.  Power failures, system lockups, application lockups (like games), 
faulty drivers, etc., come to mind.  In these cases, open files can get 
corrupted.  It is possible that SpinRite could recover enough of the 
data to allow a boot, which it often does.  After that, whether it boots 
or not, you could try the CHKDSK as Mike T. mentions.  If Windows won't 
boot, a boot CD of some sort would have to be used as Mike T. also 
mentioned.  The problem with running CHKDSK first is that if a critical 
file cannot be read, perhaps due to partially faulty data in a sector, 
that file can get deallocated in the disk directory, which means it 
essentially disappears.  The user could also try something like FIXMBR 
if I recall.  I don't remember the exact procedure to use it.  Doing 
this will probably destroy the ability to boot Linux.  So, he'd have to 
reinstall GRUB or the Windows bootloader to get back to dual boot 
status.  As a last resort, if the data is backed up, Windows could be 
reinstalled to the NTFS partition.  This would also probably require a 
reinstall of the bootloader.

When I set up my machines to dual boot, I first shrunk my NTFS partition 
from within Windows, then allocated 3 other NTFS partitions.  Then I 
installed Ubuntu and set the partitions manually for Linux to reformat 
partition 2 as EXT4 and 3 as swap and install itself there.  I had it 
put GRUB on the EXT4 partition and use a utility called EasyBCD to 
modify the Windows bootloader to point to GRUB.  The main point being, I 
used Windows own utility to resize its partition, which may be less 
prone to failure.

Sincerely,

Ron


-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier

770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT c3energy.com