Natural Order Development

What a funny story. (warning spoiler ahead) I mucked it up but good.

Ever totally destroy your boot record on an XP box? How about blowing up both your MBR and GRUB on a dual boot system. Where here I sit. Although I have a current and complete backup of all my data, it has been some time since I took an image of the disk with the software installed just as I like it. Lets face it, the box was turned to happiness, everything was installed and cleaned up and it was a perfect time to take a backup image of the laptop that could. In fact I was thinking about doing that over the holiday break.

Instead I looked at the box and got to wondering why I only had 1GB of disk space left on the laptop I explicitly bought cause it had a much larger disk then the other version of the same that had a docking station potential. That is when I discovered that I had started a dual boot experiment with the thing just before i left my previous job (which was in process of moving to an all SUSE desktop and server style).

So what happened? Well it went like this: Hmm... haven't booted to suse in over 2 years. still boots, hmm... what was the passwords... hmm.... hey nothing here at all... don't need this 2 year old SUSE partition at all ... boot back to Windows XP, open up the disk manager, delete the SUSE partition, reallocate it as a windows partition, format it, fix the driver letter assignments. Cool! Now I have a nice 80GB of "data" space / backup storage. Lets organize a bit. Move this over here, move that over there, rearrange this stuff. Wow this is nice. Whoops its 1 AM time for bed. Shutdown. ... next day ... boot ... What do you mean you don't have a bootable device? Crap ... grub was on the second partition? OK fine no problem C: was bootable before I went dual boot. So where did I stuff that XP install DVD? Ah yes Windows XP Install Disk, boot to CD, wait for it, repair console, login to C:, run fixmbr on C:, done. Solid! That should fix it. ... reboot ... What do you mean you don't have a bootable device? Crap ... Lets see, XP Install Disk, boot to CD, repair console, login to C:, run fixboot on C:, done. Solid! That should fix it. ... reboot ... what do you mean you don't have a bootable device? Crap!! Hmm... I have Partition Magic somewhere and I think it can do something about this ... ah heck, where did I put it? ... More to come.