Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with partition

Can I make a bootable DVD from a bootable partition?

DarkForest — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:57:24 -0800

I have a 7 Gb bootable recovery partition on my PC. Can I make a bootable DVD (DL) from it, either in XP or Ubuntu? Thanks!

Where's the XP Installer's Undo?

kristi — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:17:38 -0800

A Windows 2000 hard disk got clobbered by the XP installer and is "unallocated". What are my next steps? I have an old PC running Windows 2000 (SP 4). There are 3 internal drives:

D: 40 GB (Win2K system disk)
C: 200 GB
F: 500 GB

Recently, I tried to install WinXP on the C drive so I could dual-boot Win2K and XP. I ran the XP installer (new install, not upgrade); it successfully completed but I could never boot from C; it was giving me various errors about missing hal.dll and stuff. I've basically given up on the dual boot on this machine; I don't need it badly enough to spend more time on it.

After my first attempt to install XP, I discovered Win2K no longer mounts the F drive. It still shows up in the BIOS, but not in Windows Explorer; only the C and D drives show up in the Explorer address bar now.

When I go into Computer Management, I can see the missing drive in the Disk List and Graphical View, but not in the Volume List. In the Graphical View, it shows up as

(left side)
Disc 0
Basic
465 GB
Online

(right side)
[no letter drive here]
465 GB
Unallocated

As far as I can tell from Googling around, the F drive apparently had EZ-Drive on it (I tried Partition Magic 6, and it gave me an error saying "EZ-Drive has been detected on drive 0, but EZ-Drive is corrupt. Run the EZ-Drive setup diskette to correct this problem."), and apparently XP hates EZ-Drive.

I've tried running

fixmbr \Device\Harddisk0\Partition0

(that's the device that shows up using Recovery Console's map command) from the Recovery Console, but it didn't change anything.

The Add/Remove Hardware Wizard can see the drive, too (it says the device is working properly).

I ran Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostics on the drive - did the Quick Test - and got

Test completed successfully

The drive shows up in the Physical Drive list in WD Diagnostics, but not the Logical Drive list.

I'd like to just undo whatever the XP installer did to the drive and get it back to where I can read and use it again. If I have to partition it, I can do that, but I'm wondering whether EZ-Drive will remain on the disk (it sounded like that would happen, based on some of the reading I've done) and what effect that would have on anything else I need to do in the future.

I only use this machine for a couple of pieces of software and I'd like to spend as little time as I can getting it working again. If at all possible, I'd love to avoid reformatting/repartitioning the drive. It just seems like there should be SOME way to undo whatever the XP installer did.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

How should I partition my drive to make migrating from Windows Vista to Windows 7 easier?

miasma — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:37:44 -0800

PartitionFilter: I just got a new machine with Windows Vista with a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it comes out. I'm planning on doing a fresh installation of Windows 7 when I get it, but in the meantime I'd like to get settled in Windows Vista. Is there a good strategy to partitioning the 640GB HD so I can migrate with ease? Was thinking of having two partitions, one for OS, one for Program Data / Storage, and then wiping the OS partition when Windows 7 comes through. Advice?

Best partition size for 1tb NTFS drive?

patrad — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:04:14 -0800

Is there any speed advantage to partitioning a 1 TB hard drive? I plan on using it as an NTFS drive in Windows XP SP3. It's primary purpose will be mass storage for my pictures and media so it will be read a lot. My OS and Program Files reside on another physical drive.

6.5 hour repartition. What?

TomMelee — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:30:24 -0800

What the heck is going on with this laptop as I reformat and set it up to dual boot? Man I hate to waste a question like this.

My girlfriend just bought a new Toshiba laptop. It's got a 360gb HDD and windows vista. We checked drivers and decided to get rid of vista and put XP and 7 on it instead.

I tried to follow lifehacker's guide, but it would NOT allow me to repartition the existing drive. (actually there were three. a 1.5Gb, a 7Gb, and the rest all on one. I know the 7 is the system restore, but we don't need it, so I removed it and added it to the main.)

Anyway, it still wouldn't let me resize and my copy of partitionmagic only works up to XP, so that was a no-go.

I've now downloaded gparted and split the big partition into 2, and told it to format the second partition NTFS.

Here's the kicker. Creating the partition took 2.5 hours. Now it's...hell, I don't know what it's doing, it's still saying 0 of 2 steps completed and "moving sba to left and resizing to xxx". It also says 4 hours remaining.

What the hell?

It also tells me that if I stop it, I will likely have severe filesystem errors. I don't really care, because I'm wiping the system anyway. What I don't want to happen is have the disk be unreadable.

I've partitioned a million drives before. I've never heard of it taking 6 hours.

So, to wit...I don't care about any files on this thing right now. XP and 7 will be the dual-boot choices.

What to do, what to do?

Whats the Difference between a file system and a partition in Ubuntu?

complience — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:58:33 -0800

Whats the Difference between a file system and a partition in Ubuntu? I've recently migrated to Ubuntu from windows, but I still can't understand how the whole file structure works. What folder contains the actual ubuntu OS installation? What is a Grub? I've made a 2 partitions on my HD i think and I want to have my /home/ folder in one and all my other files in the other. But I only see one of the 23gig partitions, the rest of the HD space seems to be taken up by another folder called "file System" I assume this is where Ubuntu is installed.

I'm so confused, can anyone help explain it to someone with a mind still in windows mode?

Partition troubles

pandemic — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 09:48:42 -0800

Partition trouble: I'm trying to shrink my C drive so that I can install the Win7 beta on another partition--problem is, it won't shrink right. I have Vista installed on my laptop, and I'd like to take a shot at the Windows 7 beta. To do this I've tried to shrink my existing Vista partition down to make room, but for whatever reason the Disk management utility will only give me about 1.7 gigs, even though I have tons of free space on my computer (about 98 gigs in reality).

What's up? I took a screenshot that will tell the story a little better than I can:
http://i39.tinypic.com/2rdd8iw.jpg

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

Please help this n00b get his Mac OSX back!

war wrath of wraith — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:50:05 -0800

Help me get my OSX back! Ubuntu/Mac questions inside. Ok, so I did one of those very stupid things that is probably fairly easily fixable but is still a major pain in the butt, especially to someone who knows nothing about Mac OS.

I was playing around with the Ubuntu LiveCD and wanted to try the USB drive installation. Instead of choosing "Create a USB startup disk" option, I started an "Install", thinking that it would give me that option.

I stopped before any damage was done, but when I tried to boot back into my Mac OS there was no boot disk present. I suspect that the Ubuntu install, even though I aborted it, still repartitioned my Mac HD.

So I booted back into the Ubuntu, and started up GParted. I wanted to check with the experts here before I did anything colossally stupid.

I see:

/dev/sda1  |   fat32   | EFI | 200.00MiB | ... | boot
/dev/sda2  |   hfs+    |     |  74.21GiB | ... |
unallocated|unallocated|     | 125.53MiB | ... |

I'm guessing sda2 is my MacHD, and that I need to set the flag to 'boot'. But I don't recognize the other partitions, and when I untag the 'boot' flag from sda1, it turns into 'msftres', something I also don't recognize.

I am running Ubuntu 8.10, and my Mac OSX was 10.4 (if I remember correctly--it's the OS just before the newest one).

Can someone please help me get my Mac OSX back? While I'm not a complete tech n00b, where partitions and other OSs are concerned I feel rather helpless.

Building a wall inside...

boosh — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 05:14:32 -0800

Victorian house construction/DIY: building a wall in a shared loft (attic). 'What's this thing?' and 'Am I doing it right?' Our loft (attic) space runs straight through into our neighbour's house and we need to build a dividing wall. We've been trying to get a builder in to do this for years but (unsurprisingly) no-one wants the job, so it's DIY time. According to the local council there are no specific building regulations to comply with beyond creating a barrier that will be fireproof for around an hour. I think we can handle it, but there are a few complicating factors that I'm hoping the hive mind can help out with.

Here's an overall view, looking from our loft to the neighbouring house. The brick pillars are two chimney stacks running up from the lower floors through to the roof. We need to build in three parts: between the pillars and to either side.

Here's a closer view of the centre, and looking up and down. At its highest point this area is 8' tall (250cm), and the area between the pillars is 4' wide (120cm). Looking left and right of the pillars.

The really awkward bits are the roof trusses (Pic1 | Pic2) and especially these deep pits next to the pillars (Pic1 | Pic2). Do these pits serve any purpose, or are they just like that to square off the chimney breasts in the rooms below? They measure 2' on each side, and are about 4' deep.

Our first idea was to put up a stud wall and clad it on both sides with fireproof board, but now we're leaning more towards using these lightweight Thermalite concrete blocks (looks like it would be easier, cheaper and stronger). Assuming that we use the Thermalite blocks, the main questions that we've got are:

1) Should the wall be one or two blocks wide? How do we ensure that the wall is stable, especially in the central area? We would build on top of the existing party wall, which looks like it is two standard house-bricks wide.

2) What do we do about the pits by the chimney stacks? The wall would have to span these pits, although it wouldn't be particularly tall or heavy at that point. How about covering them over with tightly fitting fireproof board? Would it be safe to build on top of that?

3) How do we deal with joining the block-work to the wooden rafters? Should some kind of membrane or compound go between the block and the adjoining rafter? Should they actually be attached in any way?

Any pointers, ideas or online resources very gratefully received.

Hands-free reboot?

zardoz — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:52:16 -0800

I have an Intel iMac, and have partitioned off a Boot Camp drive that contains Windows XP. Is there any way to restart the computer into Windows without having to hold down the Alt key? I generally run OS X, but sometimes boot up Windows for various applications. I'll go to the apple menu, select "restart", wait for the shutdown and then I have to hold down the Alt button (I have a Microsoft keyboard; maybe the Mac keyboard key is something else), and then I choose which partition to boot, Mac or Windows.

I want to skip those last steps. I know I can, in OS X, go to the System Preferences and choose the default boot drive, and I've got OS X as my default. But what I want is an option right in the apple drop down menu. Instead of just "restart" and "shut down", I wish there were an additional option: "reboot in [Windows]".

And it would be great if there were yet another way to do the same thing within Windows; again, instead of just "shut down" or "restart", I could choose the drive right then and there.

Is there anything I can do to make this happen? It's not really that much time wasted, but I'd like to be able to not touch the keyboard, sort of a set-it-and-forget-it type of reboot.

Can I recover a vanished partition?

mr_felix_t_cat — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 19:36:53 -0800

A partition on my secondary hard drive disappeared over the weekend. Am I screwed? I have a Dell Vostro running Vista. Also installed is a second (slave) hard drive which was partitioned into two drives that registered as D: and I: (it was set up this way on installation, I don't really know why).

I left my computer on over the weekend. When I went in this afternoon, the I: was gone and I could not find it. Along with any data on it. Shortcuts to applications or files on that drive get error messages saying the drive does not exist. Any chance I can recover the data that used to be on the partition?

Any guidance you can offer would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

need advice on fixing hd partitions

Mayor Curley — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 08:01:04 -0800

Had a motherboard failure and it affected the hard drive. Big partition is missing and the drive is displayed as much smaller than it actually is. I don't care about the data, but I'd like to use the hard drive again at its normal capacity. I was running Kubuntu 64, left the computer on and found it dead the next morning, wouldn't post, smell of ozone near the computer. Swapped around known working components, I'm certain it was the moboard.

So I replaced the board and I was all set to reinstall. Except that the drive showed only the NTFS windows partition and root Linux partition (combined 40 gigs). There's approximately 120 gigs on there of the former swap and /home that I can't see. I tried zero-filling the drive, hoping it would just magically hit everything, but it's left me with a drive that's reported in the Kubuntu install dialogue (and an old version of Partition Magic and a host of other partition tools) as 38 gigs unformatted.

How can I get the full drive back? I tried a bunch of partition programs off an old copy of Hiram's Boot Disk that I have, nothing sees the missing partition.

Doing this from a linux bootdisk would be preferable. I could install XP on the visible space and use a windows app if that's going to be best but obviously I'm a bit sick of tinkering a the moment. Recovery of the data is not necessary.

If you give me command line instructions please talk to me like I'm dim. Because I AM! Also if you think the drive is not coming back, feel free to tell me.

I must be the only person wanting to get rid of XP and use vista.

gergtreble — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:41:51 -0800

I started with XP. Installed vista. Then I could choose between XP and Vista. I'm not using XP any more. Can I just delete the XP partition? Picture the scene. I built a HTPC and put XP media center on it. I didn't like it. So I bought vista, and amazingly it works brilliantly! When I installed vista it placed me in a dual boot scenario. I'm not using XP any more and my vista partition is running out of space. So I want to get rid of the XP partition and then expand my vista partition into the free space.

If I delete the XP partition from within Vista will I bork the boot process?

What would be the best way to get rid of the XP partition and still have a working system?

Thanks in advance.

Man Attempting to Move Leopard

indiewizard — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 07:41:38 -0800

Great MeFites, I come bearing but a humble request. I bought a MacBook Pro about six months before Leopard was released. When it finally came out, I installed it on a partition on an external drive, which I would boot from (because OS X is awesome like that, amirite?) so I could test out all my apps. Now I'm ready to commit to Leopard full-time - what's the best way to go about transplanting my Leopard partition? In my head, I would copy everything precious to the external drive, and then go into Disk Utility and select "Restore" (I'm not in front of my Mac right now, so I don't know the exact option, but it's a tab that comes up in the main pane when you select the root drive in the left-hand pane), where I would select Leopard as the source, and my internal drive as the destination. However, the internal drive is just slightly bigger than the Leopard partition - would this present a problem?

Also, what are my other options? Specifially, Carbon Copy Cloner comes to mind - is this what I need?

Also also, I would like to merge my Adium chat logs - any programs available? If this isn't possible, I'll settle for simply copying them to my Documents folder, and using Spotlight.

A thousand thank-yous in advance.

Sunday computer problems..... ahhh yeah.

thatguyryan — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 09:29:09 -0800

First time with formatting partitions or installing linux. I bought a new 200gb harddrive for my laptop. I put it in, and created 3 partitions - Drive C: a 30 gb on which i installed xp, Drive D: a 30 gb on which i plan to install for the first time a linux (maybe ubuntu), and Drive E: a 126 gb partition which i intend to house files i will want to access from either OS. At this point, everything is fine except.... that 3rd (126 gb) partition is RAW and windows right-click to format doesn't give me an option to format in FAT -only in NTFS. Am I correct that if I want to use that drive to read and write files from with both ubuntu and xp i should probably (as a noob) make it be FAT? Should the xp partition be FAT ? (It's NTFS right now.) The one i plan on being for the ubuntu is FAT32. If that third large partition needs to be FAT, how can i do that? As with all computer-solution-needed situations, easy is great; free is best. Thank you so much. Long live metafilter.

Maybe this partitioning scheme wasn't as clever as I thought ...

Nelsormensch — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 10:30:54 -0800

Is it possible to reinstall Windows XP on a small partition (~20 GB) of a single 300 GB hard drive? When I installed Windows XP originally, I made a small partition for Windows and left the rest of the disc unpartitioned. After installing SP2 (when Windows can detect hard drives greater than 127 GB), I partitioned the rest of the 300 GB hard drive for everything unrelated to the OS. I did this to allow Windows to be reinstalled without having to worry about backing up and restoring hundreds of GB of personal data.

However, today when pondering an OS reinstall, I realized that the installer on the Windows XP disc can't correctly handle HDs greater than 127 GB. It doesn't detect my HD being one 20 GB partition and one 280 GB partition. Instead it just sees one 127 GB partition of an unknown type. Obviously this means I can't just nuke the Windows partition and reinstall the OS by itself.

Aside from backing up the 280 GB partition and restoring it after reinstall up to SP2, is there any way to reinstall Windows XP without affecting the other partition?

Vista/Ubuntu Dual Boot desperate help needed :(

thesonofmorgoth — Sat, 24 May 2008 20:51:51 -0800

How to dual boot vista/ubuntu hardy heron and get everything set up. More details Inside. Starting to pull hair out :( Just a warning guys im just going to spill every piece of info i think might help solve this problem below. Sorry in advance but im at wits end.

I was planning on dual booting Vista/Hardy Heron on my compalIFL90 notebook. To do this i completely formatted the harddrive and installed vista first, giving it 40 gigs and leaving the other 120 gigs as free space. After i had installed vista i went back and installed ubuntu using the desktop 32 bit cd and just told it to use the largest contigous file. After i started playing around with my new ubuntu desktop i heard that it would be nice if i got my own home, root, and swap partitions so i went back and deleted my ubuntu partition,this time starting the manual partition mode. I made a 20 gig root, 4 gig swap and the rest of the gigs as home. I thought i was home free.

I tried following THIS GUIDE to set up my Compal, as it seems some hardware was not supported out of the box. I also installed compiz fusion and emerald theme manager, as well as the restricted drivers for my nvidia card.

and now all of a sudden im getting all these problems:

1. When i start up the computer sometimes all it says is GRUB loading stage 1.5 and just hangs there. I have to manually shut down the computer to get it back up, and then it allows me to boot into ubuntu or vista.
2. When i boot into ubuntu i just come to a white screen with a cursor sometimes, and i again have to manually shut down.
3. Once when just surfing the web this pink or purple fuzz started to border my windows and just mysteriously diapeared when i restarted.
4. I cant hibernate or sleep in my ubuntu.... while this is discussed in the above link i really dont get it.

So basically my whole installation is just crapping itself up and i have no idea why. Im not sure what i did wrong :(

So any help would be appreciated guys, and I wouldnt mind reformmating everything and starting over if i know it would work Thanks :D for reading this long post and i really hope i can get this to work i wanna learn linux :(

Ubuntu/Vista Dual Boot With a Twist! - Virtual PC in ubuntu booting existing Windows Partition! (exp ins.)

Javed_Ahamed — Fri, 09 May 2008 23:08:54 -0800

Ubuntu/Vista Dual Boot With a Twist! - Virtual PC in ubuntu booting existing Windows Partition? last week i posted this askMe and have now decided to achieve the following setup:

1. Two partitions 1 with vista and 1 with Ubuntu
2. In the ubuntu parition have a program like (Virtualbox, VMware) which will boot up from the EXISTING vista partition on the computer.

My reasoning for this is to use Ubuntu as my main OS, use the virtual vista for non cpu intensive tasks and then load up in vista natively for cpu intensive tasks.

However I will only have vista installed once on my computer saving space, and allowing programs and files to be shared between the "two" vistas.

My Question:

Do you guys know any guides/resources/anything i could consult on how to do this? I have posted on the ubuntu forums but no one has really given me any good help. I tried following a random guide on the internet on my desktop computer and all I ended up doing was corrupting the MBR in my virtual machine. I guess part of the problem is also the fact that a lot of these linux howtos just tell you to copy paste things into your terminal and I have no idea what they are doing. Maybe a site that actually explains these things and what each individual line does would also be helpful. Every guide I have seen so far seems to do something different.

P.S i would prefer to use VirtualBox to do this since it seems to be the thing everyone seems to be using now :/. If VMWare is better i guess I would do that too however. Also I know you can access files from your vista partition in Ubuntu since it can read and write to nfts but is there a way to get vista to read/write ubuntu ext3 (i think) files?

Dear PC, I swear I won't ever mess with your partitions again if you just this once...

willie11 — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:06:06 -0800

Oh crap! While attempting to clear, reformat, and merge my ubuntu partition with my primary NTFS Windows partition, I somehow managed to give the GRUB boot-loader brain damage. Now I can't boot in to either partition need to fix this before my girlfriend comes home and sees that I've rendered her computer useless. When I boot, I get the following error,

Booting form local disk...
GRUB Loading stage 1.5

GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 17

And it just hangs there forever, mocking and blinking... blinking and mocking... I wiped, reformatted, and merged my existing linux partition in to my windows partition while in windows using partition magic. However, upon reboot, I received that error. The file structure is intact, I checked with the liveCD, but GRUB is useless.

How can I get windows back?

MBP: I cloned my old HD to a new (larger) one, and OS X only sees the older (smaller) space.

dhammala — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:29:43 -0800

The disk in my MBP was upgraded from 100GB to 250GB. They used a hardware disk to disk copier that just cloned the drive, bit for bit. Now, I want to grow my 100GB partition to fill up the new space, however Disk Utility only sees the drive as 100GB. I know there are some $100 utilities out there, but I am a geek and want to do it for free. We have tried to boot into Linux, use tools like gParted (which see the full drive, but only let us create a 128MB partition), rEFIt (to sync the partition maps), etc. but to no avail.

How do I reset the partition map so that it sees the full drive?

two computers in one?

DarkForest — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 18:33:58 -0800

I have one computer and two hard drives. I'd like to emulate 2 completely separate computers. That is, each hard drive will have a separate Windows XP image and I will choose at startup which one to boot. OK so far, but, I do not want either Win XP image to ever see or interact with the other one in any way. If I am running from one hard drive, I want the other one to be completely invisible. Possible? I have the idea that one Win XP installation will mess with another one if it is visible on the local machine. I want to avoid any possibility of this. I only have space for one computer, and I'd like both a production system and another system to mess around with, screw up, and blow away at will.

I'm thinking this separation of systems might be possible with GRUB, but I'm not conversant enough with low level hard drive stuff to be sure, and to be sure it's a good idea. What do you think? Any info you might have would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

As a side note, each hard drive may also contain other OS's on other partitions, but I don't think that part will be a problem.

Walls on wheels, please

Smalltown Girl — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 10:57:49 -0800

Where can I find big partitions/doors/walls that I've seen used in lofts? I'm looking for those with heavy-duty wheels (?) that run along tracks. I want to be able to partition my messy office from the living area, but have the flexibility to roll the wall/door out of the way.

How do I recover a lost filesystem that has been partially overwritten?

oneous — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 14:00:49 -0800

I accidentally formatted my NTFS drive with HFS and wrote some data on it. Now how do I recover whatever is left? >>>Any filesystem experts around here? I was installing Mac OS 9 on an old iMac and accidentally chose the installation volume as my big external USB disk with all my important data. I had 250GB of files in NTFS on it, and the Mac OS 9 install was only a few hundred MB, so there should still be a large amount of data untouched. I want to recover anything I can (including partial/corrupted files) that still remain in NTFS.

I'd appreciate some app/method recommendations, as well as some help understanding how filesystems work and what exactly has happened.

Partitioning Wizard My Ass . . .

datacenter refugee — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 21:18:54 -0800

An unlucky series of partition moves, copies and resizes has led to GPartEd saying my NTFS partition is one size, but windows thinking it's another. What the Christ? Seemingly impossible screenshots and Order of events:

- Installed Feisty using the 'resize NTFS partition and used freed-up space' option. Accidentally made my windows partition 13 GBs (my bad).
- Began attempting to fix this - resized ubuntu root partition to ~10GBs. Screenshot here.
- Got to this state, where I had things as I wanted. If this state was real, I'd be happy.
- Upon booting into windows, I found this.

If I remove 1GB of files from the NTFS partition in windows, the same amount is removed from the GPartED representation of that partition in lunix. I've attempted to resize again in the hopes of it 'shocking' windows into realizing the size of the partition, but no dice. Honestly I don't know which of the two operating systems is telling me the truth.

I would really like to get the NTFS partition utilize the 12+ GBs it's not recognizing. Any ideas?

Vista+Ubuntu=Death

punishinglemur — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 13:40:28 -0800

I just installed Ubuntu on a new laptop, and now I can't boot into Vista. A few days ago, I purchased a new laptop. Since I had a lot of space available, I decided to install Ubuntu 6.10. I resized my Vista partition during the Ubuntu install and gave myself a total of 8GB for Ubuntu. To grab some networking files, I tried to jump back into Vista. Unfortunately, I can no longer access Windows!

When I turn on my computer, GRUB (bootloader) provides me with the three Ubuntu options (standard, recovery, memtest). I also have two entries for Windows (possibly due to the manufacturer-created recovery partition), both of which are "Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)". Selecting the first Windows option brings up the Vista startup screen (with the progress bar and MSFT copyright), and eventually dumps me to a black screen with a mouse pointer at a non-native resolution. The only way out is to force a shutdown by holding the power button for several seconds.

If I select the second Windows option, the Vista startup screen appears and never goes away. The little progress bar just keeps running, and again the only escape is shutting down through the power button.

Windows gave me the option to run Startup Repair after I selected it from the bootloader. However, this just ran through the Vista startup screen and then dumped me to a black screen.

I found something on the Ubuntu forums that suggested running chkdsk could fix things. However, I have no way to do this. My XP CD (from older computers) won't let me enter recovery mode because it claims it can't find any hard drives. Using my Vista disc is no help; when I select "Repair My System" from the boot menu, I just get the progress bar and then a blank screen. I tried getting at chkdsk by burning a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD, loading NTFS4DOS, and running chkdsk from the windows\system32 folder on my Vista partition, but I got an error stating that the program can't be run in DOS mode.

As I said, I just bought this laptop, so if I have to start over with everything it won't be a total disaster. However, I'd rather avoid having to once again reconfigure everything, download my favorite programs, and transfer about 80GB of music and photos from my old hard drive. What should I do? And if my only option is to start over, how do I do this when my Vista disc, which is supposedly able to reinstall the OS, does nothing more than dump me to a blank screen?