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Friday, October 9, 2009

When computers malfunction

11:11 PM / Technology / 2 Comments

I've only myself to blame, really. For some time now, I've run a dual boot Windows XP/Windows Vista system, keeping XP around mainly for compatibility purposes, should the need ever arise. In the last year or so, though, I don't think I've loaded it up even once, so this afternoon I had the bright idea of ditching it in order to free up some disk space. Should be easy, I thought: just delete the XP partition and reclaim the extra space by adding it to my Vista partition in the Disk Management application.

You must be joking. Like most people dual booting between these two operating systems, I installed XP first and then Vista. XP, as a result, exists on a primary partition, while Vista is on a logical partition. I could go into what these terms mean but I'd probably just bore you, and in any event I'm not 100% clear about them myself. To cut a long story short, I booted the system using my Vista DVD, deleted the XP partition and rebooted.

Reboot and select proper boot device or put media in the boot device and press any key.

Oh. Fuck.

After Googling the error message, I discovered that, by the looks of it, if you previously installed an operating system as a dual boot on a logical partition and then delete the primary partition containing your other operating system, the operating system on the logical partition will no longer boot. No problem, I thought, I'll just set the logical partition on which my Vista installation is stored to a primary partition. "Oh-ho," chortled the computer, "and how do you plan on doing that?"

Erm, yeah. It seems that there's no way of actually doing that, at least not with the tools at my disposal. After a good couple of hours dicking around with it, even going so far as to install Ubuntu on my freshly formatted primary partition in the hope of getting somewhere (no dice - Ubuntu wouldn't even boot), I bit the bullet, scrubbed the whole thing and started from scratch. Luckily I don't keep anything important on my C: drive - just my email and Firefox bookmarks, both of which I'd backed up anyway - but still, it was incredibly frustrating to have a perfectly good install of Vista that was completely inaccessible simply because, for whatever reason, the boot manager decided it couldn't access it.

I'm back up and running now with a fresh install of Vista, and in the long run I managed to reclaim the disk space being hogged by XP, but still, I lost a good afternoon and evening's worth of work time, which I'm not happy about. I'm on a deadline, y'know! I suppose it's my own stupid fault for tinkering under the hood during a hectic period rather than waiting 'til I wasn't so busy, but honestly, I thought this would be something that would take me five minutes while I ate my lunch. You live and learn.

2 Comments

 
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