lamentation: vista at last

i cant believe i am this happy to have got windows installed.

update. effectively solved, but not really, and definitely not tidily:

a) used seatools to perform a full erase of the seagate drive (took about 3 hours).
b*) unplugged seagate, tried to run memtest from WD only boot and got an error "too small lower memory ([x] > [y])"
c) unplugged the WD drive
d) booted vista installer dvd, works; running updates on windows.

I am not sure why the full erase worked, aside from that it would have erased the mbr/grub record. so i think this was a grub issue all along. i have no explanation for why this fixed it, but now i am facing a new problem.

because of the heavy-handedness of this solution, my drives currently exist only independent of each other. however, i want access to both drives and the ability to dual boot. my fears: in all likelihood, if the drives were to boot together a) there would be a conflict, or b) one mbr/boot loader would try to overwrite the other. so i will choose the windows boot loader for the sake simplicity (and windows boot loader being a finicky punk that cant update itself!). any suggestions on how to reconcile this problem from where it stands now?

essentially, i need to rewrite the mbr on the WD drive to match up with the Seagate mbr. i am afraid of just booting two boot-loaders without knowing which will take precedence (and risk grub winning and my inherited grub menu becoming 3pgs long). if anybody knows of a good bootable tool i would appreciate it.

the apparent best option to me: its ubuntu and is completely up and going in less than an hour, so i can just migrate my mp3s etc some other way and then reinstall. i dont know whats broken about my current config. I dont want to run into any further problems after i get Vista squared away. So I think this might be my best option considering i dont have much invested in the ubu install, and i am unsure what my original GRUB install method did to render the problem in the first place.

Any feedback would be appreciated, or just a +1 encouragement!

another childrens collection of links, lets see where they get us!

http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-vista-windows-7-support/476107-vista-dvd-install-fail.html#post2684216

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/284441-31-vista-install-fail

http://forums.techguy.org/windows-vista/916637-vista-dvd-install-fail.html

i thought what the hell, lets call them all the same thing.

the post

I recently got my computer back into a workable state after almost a month of work and fail. Originally I was dual booting Vista & Ubuntu, then after a platter went bad across both partitions i basically had to go back to scratch (you can find out more deets here). Anyway, I have Ubuntu 9.10 installed and it is running fine, once it boots.

my rig is a homebrew with an i7 920, intel dx58so mobo, 2x2g DDR3 ram, 850W Thermaltake, ATI 4870

I am facing two primary problems. A) my BIOS post time has gone from 3 to about 15-20 seconds, and OS boot from GRUB menu went from about 8 to 30 seconds. B) i am running into an error trying to install vista from my OEM DVD (Home Premium 64-bit); it gets to the green (kernel) loading bar part of the menu, then hangs indefinitely (for at least 25 minutes). i thought this may have to do with bios and an ide/ahci driver loading issue but in ide mode it still isnt responding. (this disk is clean, and i have used it three times previously to reinstall.)

A) i am considering updating my BIOS (which has been updated quite a few times over the past 15 months) to see if that will resolve/reset the problem. however, i am doubtful that it will and fearful that it will only cause more problems. however, could it be a physical problem with the board? i did a complete teardown and rebuild and nothing seemed to be out of order but i wouldnt have known what to check other than big problems.

B) i would hope that updating the BIOS might purge whatever difficulty the Vista DVD is having with my system and loading it. does anyone know what else may contribute to the green bar not loading? there seems to be no explanation for why it hangs there at the green loading bar in this situation. or at least i havent been able to find a similar situation. among the fixes, was the purchase of a brand new HDD (WD 1T Caviar Black) and it wouldnt install in a basic config with just the HDD and a stick of ram.

i7920 // 2x2gig DDR3 1333 // DX58SO // Thermaltake850 // ATI4870 // U.KK9.10 & [dead]64-bit Vista[/dead] 

Update on 12:30PM by mfg

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1455040

for good measure i added the ubuntu forums to the list.

Wine, 9 Button Mice, FPS; whining basically

more hacking needed, or vista refresh?             

got wow installed in wine, got graphics working by adding <SET gxApi "opengl"> to the end of the config.wtf file in my wow wtf directory. used wowiupdater to get some addons installed (sexy maps is sexy!). got a lot of my key bindings put together. one addon pack had azcast bar (which stacked all of my cooldowns on top of each other for some reason) and it took me a while to identify and disable it; installed quartz. and it was basically playable.

im not one to complain about the 35-45fps at very low settings with my second monitor disabled. i am not really too aggravated by no audio. both annoy me because i know it could be better, both make me want to install vista again. but what is KIIILLLLLLLING me is that Wine doesnt support my mouse.

yes. left, right click, middle button, scroll wheel all work; but i have a logitech LX8 which has four additional buttons. page fwd/bk, and scroll left/right. ubuntu has added support for it and its a dream in chrome. but Wine supposedly has a seven button (counting scroll up/down) limitation. consequently it is mapping those four buttons as two buttons; ie if i bind scroll left, and then try to bind scroll right it overwrites the scroll left and rebinds either as mouse button 4.

so. do i try to keep hacking to make it work; or do i spend my time trying to get my vista installed? is it as simple as a bios update? will that cure my dvd-booting issues with vista?

Update on 11:39AM by mfg

i think im going to need to get vista working again for the sake of the computer because whatever is inhibiting vista is probably a leech on the system. yeah.

a collection of tech posts: mfg-koala

http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-vista-windows-7-support/473551-solved-dual-boot-destruction-help-needed-mounting-clones.html

http://forums.techguy.org/linux-unix/914870-solved-grub-mbr-help-needed.html

http://grub.enbug.org/Grub2LiveCdInstallGuide (GRUB solution)

https://sourceforge.net/projects/clonezilla/forums/forum/663168/topic/3661506

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/236915-50-linux-vista-hardware-issues-booting

http://www.techsupportforum.com/alternative-computing/linux-support/454564-solved-request-grub-instructions.html

----------------------------------------------------

these are all posts related to koala going down. so if you would like a childrens collection of me and my attempts to getting my terrific computer usable, read up and laugh at me.

Update on 10:32AM by mfg

forgot these:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1451623

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1447403

i have in fact been slacking.

my home computer went down about three weeks ago, it had been faltering previous to that but the crash and burn was around then. i thought i had a virus in windoze. but then i started having problems in ubuntu as well (im a dual-booter). eventually i came to figure out that a platter was failing on my 1T seagate (SATA) OS hdd. the 'reallocated segment error' (a death sentence for hard drives) stretched across both OS partitions and created I/O errors that kept me from repairing the windows partition.

so i cloned my OS partitions over to my other 1T (Seagate SATA) drive ( i also have a 320gig IDE drive bootstrapped with a SATA adapter), with the original intention of zero-erasing/formatting the failing drive (of course then i found out that it wouldnt help). but the way i did this in clonezilla, it didnt image the partitions, rather, it did a file for file dump.

so anyway, after trying to reinstall grub and get my mbr back in order manually i had to try the automagickal route, installing a fresh copy of ubuntu 10.04 beta 1 (i know i should have grabbed something more stable). during the install process it found both the Vista and 9.10 installations and tried to import their settings. i was excited to restart and get off the ground, fingers crossed.

black screen. nothing. i booted up system boot manager to try to revise boot order and partition management. nothing changed in any config of tagging the partitions active, automatic, or hidden.

so i grabbed my OEM vista dvd and popped it in the drive to see where it would get me. it got me to just after the green loading bar to where there was a mouse and some colors and it would just hang there.

last night i installed a fresh WD 1T hdd (SATA). upon installing this guy my 320 no longer shows up and the partition information on the 'healthy' seagate 1T is missing and i have a bunch of partitions with 'unknown types.' i did a complete tear down and rebuild to check for any physical problems. noticed nothing wrong, submitted for the night.

woke up at 630am to start rebuilding before work. got all the components back together. made a few tweaks to my cable management to improve air flow around hard drives (that WD Caviar Black runs HOT). installed ubuntu 9.10 on the WD hdd. before leaving i started a cylinder by cylinder check for partition information using testdisk on the seagate 1T backup drive.

the most frustrating thing about the whole thing is not knowing how to phrase the various problems, or how to begin to think of solutions to unknown pathologies.

Update on 9:01AM by mfg

got home last night, checked on testdisk and it recovered my missing partitions. i re-wrote them to the drive. rebooted, hoping to get the fresh ubu install, however, i ended up at the GRUB-Restore> prompt. grub CLI makes me panic. the -restore part is even worse because it limits the number of commands available. so i ran ismod /normal.mod or whatever its called to try to get GRUB into normal.mode. fail. however, i ran ls and it found all my disks and partitions.

so i tried to root the new ubu partition as the /boot, but apparently that function doesnt work from GRUB-Restore>. oh well. i think JA is coming over tonight to help with the hacking. i had previously tweeted that every other time i had broken my pc, i had learned something in fixing it. this time was different was my caveat, i just wanted it fixed. somehow, i have come back from that desperate precipice. i am happy again learning from where i perceive my situation to be, its not too bad and i should be able to get it hacked back together with a little patience. nice.

G-R> , we have a date with destiny tonight.

Update on 1:22PM by mfg

i have GRUB! i have sda and sdb persistence! i have no windows and must wait 20 seconds for bios to post! what can it mean? tell windows to fuck off and pimp its ho ass with virtualbox like the whore she is!