LinuxGeek
April 30th, 2007, 02:23 AM
My new laptop came with vista preinstalled on it. As a *nix user, my first impulse was to just wipe the drive and install Linux on it, but then decided to try leaving M$ on it and setting it up to dual-boot. I had used DD 9.0 in the past to resize M$ partitions and create new partitions on other computers so I could install Linux on them, and everything worked great. Not this time! I've hosed my hard drive a couple of times now trying to get this to work...but it's just not.
The problems start when DD reports: "Error: cannot write disk 1 sector [whatever]" If I 'retry' it keeps failing, so I 'ignore' and it moves on...but keeps hitting new sectors it can't write to.
Finally, after apparently (i.e., reaching 100% progress) successfully completing the tasks it's working on (resizing the existing partition, etc.), it bombs with a message saying something about "Invalid format" (sorry, I didn't jot it down, so this is from memory).
After that, the computer will not boot. Windows attempts to start, then briefly flashes a blue screen with a lot of hex code on it (which goes by too quickly to really see what it says), then gets stuck in an endless cycle of asking if I want to run its 'repair' function--which I try, to no avail--and failing to boot. :gack:
Using the DD rescue disc to boot, I then find that the newly-created Linux partition is listed as 'unallocated' (instead of ext2 or ext3, as chosen), and the newly-shrunken 'doze partition appears to be empty. :ouch:
I'm at a loss as to what else to do. Any ideas?
The problems start when DD reports: "Error: cannot write disk 1 sector [whatever]" If I 'retry' it keeps failing, so I 'ignore' and it moves on...but keeps hitting new sectors it can't write to.
Finally, after apparently (i.e., reaching 100% progress) successfully completing the tasks it's working on (resizing the existing partition, etc.), it bombs with a message saying something about "Invalid format" (sorry, I didn't jot it down, so this is from memory).
After that, the computer will not boot. Windows attempts to start, then briefly flashes a blue screen with a lot of hex code on it (which goes by too quickly to really see what it says), then gets stuck in an endless cycle of asking if I want to run its 'repair' function--which I try, to no avail--and failing to boot. :gack:
Using the DD rescue disc to boot, I then find that the newly-created Linux partition is listed as 'unallocated' (instead of ext2 or ext3, as chosen), and the newly-shrunken 'doze partition appears to be empty. :ouch:
I'm at a loss as to what else to do. Any ideas?