I really should be working solely on finishing my workshop for the IFTE English teachers conference but I have this HUGE problem with leaving new toys in an unworking state.
I was pretty happy with my new acer aspireone 522 netbook, of course I decided to install Ubuntu 10.10, planning to use the GRUB bootmanager. Nice one! 10.10 installed nicely and GRUB being as cool as it is discovered the other Windoze partitions (both the restore partition and the actual windows 7 one) and added them to my bootloader menu.
BUT then I decided to slap a copy of Android on there too. I thought it would be pretty cool to have 3 OSs and seeing as the android-x86 crew were using GRUB too, things should be sweet! Well, things would have been sweet if I hadn't let the Android distro do it's own job of reinstalling Grub. Suddenly all my boot entries were lost! Oh noes! Ubuntu and Windoze are gone. I can only use Android!
I can solve that, I thought to myself, I'll just find some instructions on reinstalling GRUB and it will find all my OSs in their various partitions. Now, here's the problem with letting boot managers do their own thing and having OEM copies of OSs already installed on your spanking new netbook. I assumed (foolishly it would seem) that the small sdb2 partition would be were GRUB had originally installed itself. After spending stupid amounts of time downloading and messing with the completely unhelpful rescatux I eventually I reinstalled GRUB to the partition from an Ubuntu live CD on USB flash drive via a bunch of crazy mount commands, some interesting if and do statements and other bits and pieces. Of course, it turns out this small, innocent partition wasn't the main boot partition for GRUB at all, it was where the factory OEM install of Windoze 7 puts it's MBR!!! OMG! I've just killed my Windoze 7 master boot table!
I suppose there's actually a good reason for putting an MBR in it's own partition, like it won't get fragmented, it stays near the start of the platter and all that bollocks but unfortunately, looking at all those partitions in gparted I just assumed sdb2 would contain my GRUB bootloader. Now I'm not only missing the bootloader entry for Windoze in GRUB, I can't even load it anyways! Typically, I didn't actually discover this until after I reinstalled Ubuntu 10.10, GRUB did it's magic again and on selecting the Windoze 7 bootloader entry I was given a bunch of nasty looking errors.
When it came to trying to restore my Windoze MBR, things got even worse. Obviously it would be too much to assume that the Acer recovery partition would actually contain helpful options, like repair Windoze, restore MBR or even give you a command line to run fixmbr from. But of course, it doesn't. The really helpful people who designed the OEM recovery for the Aspireone, in their infinite wisdom, decided the only options anyone would actually need would be 1) reinstall Windoze completely or 2) reinstall Windoze completely but ohhhhh, we'll also backup your user files to C:/backup. Good one people. You can see why I love hardware manufacturers doing fancy things with their OEM versions of Windoze.
I tried a few other tricks here but sadly the only other PC I have with Windoze on it, is running Windoze xp 64bit which can't format usb drives as bootable, which means I can't get a windoze recovery loaded to fix the mbr! Not to mention the fact that ms-sys doesn't appear to exist for Ubuntu 10.10 and lilo refused to mbr my sbd2 partition (sdb1 contains the restore files for windoze). Well, after all that (what a mission!) I've eventually admitted defeat and am now watching Windoze 7 reinstall itself. There goes all my time spent stripping away all the USELESS and INTRUSIVE software that came with the netbook, not to mention all the terrabytes (small exaggeration there) of annoying Windoze updates.
I so miss the old days when you could install your own OS, partition your hard drive however the hell you wanted and there was no such thing as annoying-as-hell OEM bloatware that fills you system tray along with foolish laptop/netbook manufacturers configurations of your hard drive. Sure, people like to bag Windoze 98 and especially ME but crikey, at least back then you didn't have to cope with the crap that hardware manufacturers load into Windoze and then deal with supposed recovery options that don't actually do anything useful.
And finally, to make the whole thing a completely pointless exercise, the Android distro didn't work anyway! Wireless throws an error whenever I try to turn it on and the PC doesn't come out of standby mode. I even tried the generic distro, one for eeeeepcs and another for spartans or some crap. I'm giving up on computers for a couple of days I think, judging by the gratuitous use of exclamation marks in this post, I suppose it's fairly obvious I'm fired up about the whole thing. I think I might have to get some PS3 time in after this damn workshop tomorrow. Speaking of which (and I talking about the workshop prep here, not playing PS3) I should probably get back to it....
I was pretty happy with my new acer aspireone 522 netbook, of course I decided to install Ubuntu 10.10, planning to use the GRUB bootmanager. Nice one! 10.10 installed nicely and GRUB being as cool as it is discovered the other Windoze partitions (both the restore partition and the actual windows 7 one) and added them to my bootloader menu.
BUT then I decided to slap a copy of Android on there too. I thought it would be pretty cool to have 3 OSs and seeing as the android-x86 crew were using GRUB too, things should be sweet! Well, things would have been sweet if I hadn't let the Android distro do it's own job of reinstalling Grub. Suddenly all my boot entries were lost! Oh noes! Ubuntu and Windoze are gone. I can only use Android!
I can solve that, I thought to myself, I'll just find some instructions on reinstalling GRUB and it will find all my OSs in their various partitions. Now, here's the problem with letting boot managers do their own thing and having OEM copies of OSs already installed on your spanking new netbook. I assumed (foolishly it would seem) that the small sdb2 partition would be were GRUB had originally installed itself. After spending stupid amounts of time downloading and messing with the completely unhelpful rescatux I eventually I reinstalled GRUB to the partition from an Ubuntu live CD on USB flash drive via a bunch of crazy mount commands, some interesting if and do statements and other bits and pieces. Of course, it turns out this small, innocent partition wasn't the main boot partition for GRUB at all, it was where the factory OEM install of Windoze 7 puts it's MBR!!! OMG! I've just killed my Windoze 7 master boot table!
I suppose there's actually a good reason for putting an MBR in it's own partition, like it won't get fragmented, it stays near the start of the platter and all that bollocks but unfortunately, looking at all those partitions in gparted I just assumed sdb2 would contain my GRUB bootloader. Now I'm not only missing the bootloader entry for Windoze in GRUB, I can't even load it anyways! Typically, I didn't actually discover this until after I reinstalled Ubuntu 10.10, GRUB did it's magic again and on selecting the Windoze 7 bootloader entry I was given a bunch of nasty looking errors.
When it came to trying to restore my Windoze MBR, things got even worse. Obviously it would be too much to assume that the Acer recovery partition would actually contain helpful options, like repair Windoze, restore MBR or even give you a command line to run fixmbr from. But of course, it doesn't. The really helpful people who designed the OEM recovery for the Aspireone, in their infinite wisdom, decided the only options anyone would actually need would be 1) reinstall Windoze completely or 2) reinstall Windoze completely but ohhhhh, we'll also backup your user files to C:/backup. Good one people. You can see why I love hardware manufacturers doing fancy things with their OEM versions of Windoze.
I tried a few other tricks here but sadly the only other PC I have with Windoze on it, is running Windoze xp 64bit which can't format usb drives as bootable, which means I can't get a windoze recovery loaded to fix the mbr! Not to mention the fact that ms-sys doesn't appear to exist for Ubuntu 10.10 and lilo refused to mbr my sbd2 partition (sdb1 contains the restore files for windoze). Well, after all that (what a mission!) I've eventually admitted defeat and am now watching Windoze 7 reinstall itself. There goes all my time spent stripping away all the USELESS and INTRUSIVE software that came with the netbook, not to mention all the terrabytes (small exaggeration there) of annoying Windoze updates.
I so miss the old days when you could install your own OS, partition your hard drive however the hell you wanted and there was no such thing as annoying-as-hell OEM bloatware that fills you system tray along with foolish laptop/netbook manufacturers configurations of your hard drive. Sure, people like to bag Windoze 98 and especially ME but crikey, at least back then you didn't have to cope with the crap that hardware manufacturers load into Windoze and then deal with supposed recovery options that don't actually do anything useful.
And finally, to make the whole thing a completely pointless exercise, the Android distro didn't work anyway! Wireless throws an error whenever I try to turn it on and the PC doesn't come out of standby mode. I even tried the generic distro, one for eeeeepcs and another for spartans or some crap. I'm giving up on computers for a couple of days I think, judging by the gratuitous use of exclamation marks in this post, I suppose it's fairly obvious I'm fired up about the whole thing. I think I might have to get some PS3 time in after this damn workshop tomorrow. Speaking of which (and I talking about the workshop prep here, not playing PS3) I should probably get back to it....
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