Nothing but problems...

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.

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.

I'm at a loss as to what else to do. Any ideas?

 

DD 9 shouldn't be used to do any procedures with Vista partitions. And, even though DD 10 build 2,160 is supposed to be Vista compatible, it still screws up Vista's partitions.

What you need to do is resize the Vista partition down using Vista's disk management. Then you can create partitions using DD in the unallocated space.

 

Thanks for the advice, MudCrab. (Love that name, by the way!) I'm totally unfamiliar with Vista's disk management tools, but will take a look as soon as I get back from an appointment this afternoon. Thanks again, and if all goes well I'll post an update!