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June 3rd 2006
(10) Ubuntu 6.06 Update - HELP
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Update: I’ve now managed to actually copy my precious documents off my laptop via numerous trips to and from my laptop and desktop PC. After staying up until 01:30 this morning just to actually get it to boot into Windows, I’m now stuck with an error that says “autochk program not found - skipping AUTOCHECK” and I can’t proceed any further. If you’ve had this before please leave a comments with your solution. Thanks.
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Well, I gave installing Ubuntu 6.06 a go on my laptop around 30 minutes ago and now I believe that all my partitions on my harddrive are now unrecoverable. During the installation I resized my Windows partition minus 8GB (enough to still leave me 15GB of free space for Windows). I told the partition manager to create two new partitions - one ext3 partition of 7GB and one linux-swap partition of 1GB, more than what the instructions asked for. I then proceeded to the next step and it gave me options to mount the root. Unfortunately, the partitions I had just made didn’t show up in the drop down list - only the Windows partition did. So, I went to the previous step and that was when I swallowed my heart. Error symbols and the window showing my NTFS Windows partition was now a FAT16 partition. And that linux-swap partition I had created was now a NTFS file system and the ext3 one was now a FAT16 filesystem. I have to say that I did want to die. This is my damn laptop and I’ve only had it just over a bloody year. I exited the Ubuntu install and restarted the laptop.
Bad PBR
I only assume that is something to do with the boot record. I then fired up the Windows Recovery console, and wrote a new master boot record (MBR) but to no avail. I then fired up the console again and checked if the Windows partition was actually in the boot record. It wasn’t. I’m now running the in-built diagnostics to try and determine the problem but all this time I’ve been writing, it’s at 5%.
Please, please, if you’ve encountered this before, or know someone who has, please help me. Cheers guys. I’ll update when I can - if I can.
Same thing happened to me twice.
If you could expand on that, it’d be very helpful.
I thought about connecting the laptop harddrive to my desktop PC and copying the files (if possible). What was your solution?
Expand on what? I didn’t post anything.
Ramble. Expand on what happened and how, and if, you solved the problem.
Boot back up with knoppix. As root mount the windows partition and then using cfdisk /mnt/windowspartition check and see if the windows partition is bootable. If not then try setting it to bootable.
If that doesn’t work then maybe try the fdisk command from windows to rewrite the mbr?
[…] I took no notice of other people’s advice not to upgrade my current Windows XP installation to vista because I didn’t have enough space to create a new partition for Vista nor did I want to erase all my precious data for a fresh install. So, unlike my linux install on my laptop, I backed up all my documents and application data onto a few DVDs and I started the install. The upgrade process took around 5 hours for me - maybe because of the large amount of space my Windows XP partition occupied. After the update process had restarted my computer numerous times it was time to boot up Microsoft Windows Vista - oh, the err… joy. […]
I posted on ubuntuforums about Bad PBR in case anyone cares to have a look!
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=276678
This is really wierd s*…!
Hey, thanks for giving us an update. Glad to see some other people are having the problem. Seems to be mostly confined to Dell PCs!
No problem Sunny!
Up s**t creek, we shall not stand alone!
Keeping in touch - have a good day.
Thierry
A friend have the same problem, with the winxp cd, i make a fixboot, fixmbr and that fixed it