Hey sorry guys, college and 2 jobs gets in the way some times... especially when you have school then 2 shifts back to back 2 days in a row...

When I boot into sda2, there is no option to boot sda5. It loads automatically into HP's system recovery. If I had the option to boot into windows through booting from sda2 I would accept having to do that heh.

Alright so it seems my best bet would be to take a copy of sda2 and save it on some form of media (external hard drive in my case), then use cfdisk to remake the partitions the way I want it to, putting sda2 back to where I want it?

blackhole: it's actually about 8GB. :P

So essentially I want to put the 8 gig install partition physically before the windows partition? Right now the install partition is physically the last partition. I don't mind doing some messy work as long as I can ensure that I save at least the i386 folder.


So I should use Parted, GParted, or QTParted. Are there any other suggestions? Or suggest which one would be best?

I think I may have found a way out of it. Because the windows installation occurred, I can take the... I don't know if I can be specific here. I can take the stuff that I would need to make my own custom boot cd. Then use the GParted live cd, destroy everything, then install windows on the entire hard drive, then install mandriva on top of that and make the partitions as I see fit. I just have to remember where I put the cd! :P

Thanks again for everyone's help.

Quite right. Now you know I can make a mistake. (I've known it for several decades!) That's good. I wouldn't want you foolishly thinking I was infallible.

I was already posting below about my original idea, when I realized it might be best if you simply try to reinstall MS-Windows in its current position to see what happens. To be super cautious, I suggest backing up sda2 first, and also the current partition tables:

Make sure you hold on to the sda2 and partition table backups until you've totally completed the process and are convinced everything is working properly. If that fails, then what follows was my original idea ...



Yeah. Make sure you save sda2 along with any data from the other partitions that you deem valuable. Saikee (whose experience I must respect) may disagree, but I would suggest using you favorite *parted tool to delete all the other partitions except sda2 and then either move or copy it, so that it ends up as sda1 and sitting physically at the beginning of the disk. Then boot it from the GRUB command line using a live CD, and proceed to install MS Windows. Hopefully the installer lets you select the partition size, so it doesn't take up the whole rest of the disk. (The ability to resize is nice when you need it, but I would prefer to avoid it where possible.) If that goes well, my guess is you will have MS Windows on sda2 (a primary parition), physically immediately after sda1 (your FAT install partition).

i386 folder? I am not sure what you are referring to. Certainly save what ever you need, and definitely what is now sda2.

I'll admit I am somewhat guessing about the partition order. Assuming you are going to eventually want an extended partition, I think it is easiest if it is physically after the primary paritions. And if the reinstallation of Windows attempt that I suggested at the top of this post fails to get it bootable, I am guessing it is because it wants to be on a primary partition. You can certainly try something else, but that is my reasoning.

That's not good! I wonder if perhaps the Windows partition somehow became corrupted. I don't have a great deal of experience with NTFS, but if it has the driver, Linux should be able to read it. And I think it is quite standard these days for distros to compile in NTFS support (at least read only). If you have something of value on the Windows paritition you wish to recover, you could try a KNOPPIX live CD just to double check. It definitely has the capability to read NTFS.


I'm not sure, but I think that is close to what I was talking about. Except for the "whole disk" part.

Anyway, good luck. Post back if you need to. Or if doing this gives you any wisdom to impart to other people who may read this thread in the future to try to solve their problems.


P.S. Rather than try to fit this into the rest of my post after the fact ... If this is Windows Vista you are dealing with, I believe I have read that MS once again diddled with the format of NTFS where the old NTFS drivers in Linux wouldn't read it. I think there are some new drivers out now that will. But if your Mandriva software is a little old, that might be why you can't read the NTFS partition.

blackhole54: Heh I would never suggest you were infallible. Infallible or not, you have been a great help.

That is exactly what I have been doing. The install partition finds the the NTFS partition just fine, and installs everything perfectly. I need to (and will before you read this) edit my last post again. I thought I had deleted the line that said I couldn't mount and read the partiton before I wrote that last bit about finding a way out.

I can't seem to get GParted, QTParted, or Parted to work. It keeps saying I need libuuid. I even installed some other software that websites told me to install so I could get that lib file, and nothing. Right now the only partition I need is sda2 to an extent. Really all I need is the I386 folder. I think I could probably use the Mandriva partition changer and put a 9 gig FAT32 partition first, then an NTFS partition, then copy the folders from the previous sda2 on to the new sda1. Unfortunately the install partition does not allow me to choose what partition to make. The XP cd can, but the HP recovery OS does not. So I would have to delete all of the partitions to make sure I start fresh, then sda1 (FAT32) as a 9 gig, and and sda2 (NTFS) as a 192 partition. Install windows using the entire hard drive, and then put Mandriva back on resizing everything during install.

Alternatively, I could make my own boot cd from the install partition and say to hell with it. That was where the I386 comes into play. Create my own bootable install cd, this allows me to get rid of all that crapware.

And no this is not Vista heh. I'm using Media Center Edition (or Media Centre Edition because I'm Canadian :P) or MCE2 as was referenced in my GRUB post.


As a side note, I keep finding myself enjoying Linux more and more. Even though nothing is working as of yet, I still find myself more and more interested in it.

If I didn't need Autocad, or my USB phone, I would have no need for Windows.

I am not sure what you are using to try to run parted/Gparted/QTParted. You might try it from a live CD. You can download a live CD that is nothing but Gparted. The KNOPPIX CD has both QTParted and (I believe) parted. (I've forgotten where I found it, but a couple years ago I even found a 2 floppy bootable set for running parted. But that's probably going a little far for your needs.)

The only thing you would need [G,QT]parted for is moving a partition. You could use fdisk or cfdisk for adding/deleting partitions and either dd or PartImage for backing up sda2. If you just want to copy a folder from sda2 (I think I finally figured out what the i386 folder is ), you should be able to just mount the sda2 partition from Linux and copy it.

I'm glad you're enjoying Linux. Good luck straightening things out, and post back if you need to.

Basically right now my only concern is whether or not if I copy sda2, can I copy it on to an NTFS drive? It's coming from FAT32, through linux, and on to NTFS. I know this is common sense based on what we've been talking about here. I know that some of the software is still read only for NTFS, but I don't know whether or not Mandriva 2007 has NFTS write support.

I suppose I could just try it, and see if they have a "verify" part to ensure that it copied properly.

And does anyone know if the GParted boot CD is capable of writing to NTFS external hard drives? Or is it simply GParted bootable?

AudioBandit,

I am not up to date on NTFS since (except for an occasional experiment) I don't use it on any of my systems. Unless somebody else posts here with the info, you will have to research whether Madriva handles writing to NTFS. My understanding is, that historically the fear was that while perhaps a driver were to appear to write to NTFS correctly, it may, in fact, have mangled the file system.

My understanding is GParted correctly understands the NTFS and can therefore do the resizing correctly. I believe resize is the only reason GParted would have reason to write to NTFS.

As far as verifying contents of directory structures, the diff command has a -r (recursive) option for that purpose.