Gosh I love Microsoft/Make sure to backup
So, I’ve been having problems with Windows recently. When I open “My Computer” it freezes and when killed (since it’s a system program) crashes the system. Also, I have installed programs recently that insisit on associating certain files with itself even though I know I checked for it not to. However, when I changed back the associations the icons didn’t change. This along with Windows booting up slow prompted me to format and reinstall.
There’s a couple things to keep in mind. For one, I partition my drives. I like to have Windows on one partition, music on another partition, games on another, so on and so forth. This makes it easier when I need to wipe the drive of windows as I don’t lose my files that I’ve downloaded.
The second thing to keep in mind is I dual-boot. Dual-booting for those of you that don’t know is when you boot two operating systems from one hard drive. I dual-boot Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP. I am a big fan of Ubuntu and if you haven’t checked it out yet you really should. I will put links at the bottom of the post if your interested.
So anyway, I decided to format Windows. I booted up my 100% Legal version of Windows XP CD *cough* and formatted C:. I went through the procedure of installing Windows files on the hard drive so I could continue on to the second step of booting from the hard drive. Unfortunately this is as far as I got. Apparently, Windows didn’t like GRUB taking up the MBR and decided to overwrite it with it’s version of the MBR. It didn’t do this correctly. When I rebooted I was back at the first step. I went through this several more times before booting into the “System Recovery” tool to repair the MBR. When I “repaired” the MBR it erased my partitions (or so I thought).
At this point I was livid. I pulled my drive from my system and put it in my mom’s computer and verified that Windows didn’t recognize any partitions on my drive other than the one with Windows files. I downloaded a partition recovery program and luckily was able to recover my partitions. For those of you who are looking for a good program for that, use Partition Table Doctor, as it works quite well.
So, after all this I have been running Ubuntu’s LiveCD until my Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 comes and external hard drive enclosure. I will be taking my old hard drive and putting that in the external hard drive enclosure for my backup and using the new hard drive for my main system disk. The hard drive enclosure I’ll be using is the Vantec Nexstar 3 NST-360U2-BK. I’ll post an update when it all arrives.