Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Goodbye Gutsy... or not.

Sometimes, when you're tired, you do something really, really dumb.  So I decided to clean out the Linux partition on my old Acer laptop.  I had also discovered that the DVD drive can't read anything and the Acer recovery partition is throwing a fit on me by complaining about the dreaded missing GUI (*.WSI) files and it was giving me the error reason 0xa0000001.  Before it had dawned upon me too, I had made GRUB totally useless by purging the Linux partition (Way to go, idiot!).

To boot up my Windows Vista partition, I downloaded unetbootin and setup my 1 GB usb stick with Super Grub Disk.  Allow unetbootin to install the SGD because SGD2 doesn't work with it.

From SGD, the first thing I tried is to fix the Windows boot which would effectively kill GRUB on the mbr, but this did not work.  Using the Boot & Tools menu got me to select Boot Partition and start up my old Vista install.  At least I got to boot it!  Now to make my recovery partition work!

For resource, I'm going with this forum thread.  This reminded me that the way the partitions where setup when I got them was that I had an C: partition with the label ACER and a D: partition with the label DATA.  Since all the drive letters were mucked up badly, and Acer doesn't do a good job to make their recovery routines robust, I think I'll try to get my laptop partitions setup to resemble the way it did back when it was new.  Hopefully then I get finally get the factory reset stuff to work.

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