Re: Well, there goes Windows!

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 4:41 PM, Matt <sendtomatt_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> On 08/18/11 16:24, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>>
>> So, I used the bsdinstaller again on the 9.0-BETA1 media with manual
>> partitioning. The HP desktop ate up 3 partitions, I inconveniently
>> forgot that geom can't grok secondary PC MBR partitions, was fooling
>> around and cleared the partitions, etc. I hit abort to exit the
>> partitioner start and from scratch and now my Windows partitions and
>> recovery partitions are gone.
>>
>> So, oops... just a word of warning for anyone else that monkeys around
>> with bsdinstall that it doesn't always hold true to the "will apply
>> changes at Exit" guarantee right now (i.e. atomicity is busted). If
>> someone else has a second OS that they'd rather not lose, at least
>> they will know to reboot their box when committing changes.
>>
>> I'll inspect the code sometime this weekend to trace down the annoying
>> bug, but this is probably release gating for new users (and sadly
>> forces me back to wanting to use sysinstall :/..).
>
> Geom can do EBR ("Logical") etc...and definitely can do all 4 primary
> partitions...some of that requires kernel options I think though.
> I think that's what you're referring to?

bsdinstall doesn't talk EBR yet though.

> Also, if you haven't overwritten the actual *data*, just the mbr, there may
> still be hope see testdisk in ports? I've never used it though. Maybe dd
> backup whole disk first?
>
> My guess is you just smashed the MBR/partition table and need it fixed.

Correct, but then I used it as an excuse to continue with nuking
everything. I didn't lose a lot of sleep over it because I meant to
nuke it eventually and have access to a legal copy of XP Corporate.

> Maybe you don't need windows anymore subconsciously?
> RDP & VirtualBox work fine for me :)

Exactly :). The point behind having the recovery partition was to get
everything back in the event that something went south, but most of
the HP Windows software that comes prepackaged with desktops is junk
(and the recovery software wipes the rest of the drive, which is not
desirable).

Thanks!
-Garrett