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 Post subject: cannot install windows
 Post Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 2:48 am 
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Sigh, I totally lost my media system...

Since I had my media system dual booting with Win 7 and the Win 10 preview I decided it was time to re-do things.

All was good as it was but I had no intention of keeping Win 10. I used EasyBCD to remove 10 from the boot menu then formatted the 10 partition. All was good and I booted directly to 7 without issue. I made a new image backup and proved it with a restore. All was good.

My intent was to install 8.1 on the partition that had held 10 but there were issues... When 8 (my install media is 8 not 8.1) installed it failed saying that it could not instal on an MBR drive. I don't really understand this as I had 8 then 8.1 installed on this drive previously. The installer demanded that the drive be set up for GPT.

Now I make a really BAD move. I happen to have an 'emergency' drive. It is a little 40GB drive with Win 8 installed. I used my internal to external cables to connect this drive and used the system BIOS boot selection to launch. Booted perfect to Win 8 as expected. Through this boot I used EaseUS Partition to convert the drive from MBR to GPT, BAD move on my part. Windows 7 was totally lost. Even going back to MBR would not restore a good boot to 7, it was toast.

OK, not a major issue as I have a proven image and can restore and try different directions. Sadly I get a bit clumsy and drop the image drive. I swear it was like slow motion. I see the side of the drive hit my kitchen counter then the floor where it bounced on at least three corners. Sigh, the system won't even boot with the drive connected, it is toast.

I am now down to the only working boot being from that little 40GB drive with Win 8. Using this little drive to manipulte storage I am now back to a working dual boot on the system. In fact this post is being sent from the Win 7 side of the boot.

If anyone really wants the true gory details as a step by step list I will try to compose but I am not going to bother unless asked.

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 Post Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 7:13 am 
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ouch, ouch, and ouch again.

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 Post Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 10:32 am 
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Jay, I won't say "I told you so," because I probably didn't, and I don't really feel that way anyway. But I had one disaster with a dual boot/boot sector situation, and that was enough for me. I gave it up years ago. It simply got too complex, and too dangerous (I run a business on my computer, as you know), and I firmly believe that at some point it will go south. I do not recommend dual booting for anyone under any circumstances, unless perhaps they are two different drives - but even then I don't like it due to the MBR issues.

That said, I'm sorry about what happened to you. I suspect you aren't in the catastrophe stage and will recover what you need.

That does, of course, bring up the old mantra from myself and Acadia, "Backup, backup, backup." Actually that's his mantra. Mine was "Multiple backups, multiple media." I still do that.

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 Post Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 11:39 am 
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Everything is already recovered. I didn't actually lose anything but some time.

I actually had another image I could have used but that would have included Win 10. Since the partitioning was a mess I just started over.

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 Post Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 3:08 pm 
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Oops! that could have been so bad if it had happened to someone with less knowledge than you. :(

I'm pleased to hear you have recovered but try not to do anything silly like that again. :lol:

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 Post Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 6:56 pm 
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@ Patty; I'm still going with the dual boot but 8.1 will be used very seldom. Since I insist on Win 7 being the main OS on my media system I need another OS that can natively handle the size drives I'm using. Yes I could put one in my dock and set up a large drive on my laptop. Even with a patch Win 7 cannot really do much as to setting up a drive over 3TB. I DO agree with multiple media for images which is why I had a second drive with an older image that I ended up using. 8-)

@ Joan; The sad part is that it looks like I could have saved the whole thing. My mother board uses UEFI. I could have just changed things in my BIOS and probably would not have had the Win 8 install issues that led to the meltdown. It boils down to a case of being in a hurry and making things take longer in the end.

@ Steve; Ended up being not nearly as much of an 'ouch' as I probably deserved. :shock:

-----------------------------

The issue is fully resolved now. I DID change my mind and went ahead and restored my other image which worked fine. I was going to, and did initially, start from scratch but looked at the stack of installs and updates to do and went with the image. I just wiped the Drive of all partitions beyond the Win 7 partition, which is the first on the drive, and set up new partitions. I also shrunk the Win 7 partition from ~270GB to ~150GB. There is absolutely no need for it to be ~270GB. My old partition setup looked like the following and was rather a mess as I shrunk the data partition to make room for Win 10 then shrunk the 10 partition to add a 'scratch' or working partition.
<Win 7 ~270GB><Data ~500GB><Win 10 ~156GB><working ~5GB>
The new partitioning makes more sense to me with the following. I was not about to sit and figure out exactly how many MB to set the partitions so just rounded with zeros.
<Win 7 ~146GB><Win 8.1 ~146GB><Working ~49GB><Data ~590GB>
While I could be wrong this partitioning just seems to make more sense to me.

I made a couple of other changes such as moving all my audio to the 4TB media drive but stuff like that is trivial except for the time it takes for Media Player to re-index everything but that is in the background so who cares. ;)

Since the image I used was a little over a month old I had to re-install a few things that I'm looking at but that was a matter of about 15 minutes total. I also lost a new email contact but still had the piece of paper with the info so no loss at all. Since the meltdown happened just yesterday evening the entire restore has been less than 24 hours. Would have been a matter of just a couple of hours if I had gone ahead and restored the older image right away.

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 Post Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 7:57 pm 
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Still an ouch. :-D

I agree with Patty on dual boot. It isn't worth the risks or the headaches, in my opinion.

-steve

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 Post Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 8:10 pm 
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sboots wrote:
Still an ouch. :-D

I agree with Patty on dual boot. It isn't worth the risks or the headaches, in my opinion.

-steve

I can see the point of view but have been running multiple boots since the days of Win 2000 if not 98SE and this is the first issue I recall ever having. Even in this case it had a lot to do with my not doing my homework when an initial minor problem appeared.

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 Post Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 10:09 pm 
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Well, like I said, it's just a matter of time. Kind of like a hard drive failing. It will happen. ;)

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 Post Posted: Fri Jul 24, 2015 9:13 am 
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I've only dual booted a couple of times and never for very long. Had a WinME machine and dual booted it with XP for a while till I was used to XP, the same when 7 came out I had a Vista machine and dual booted with 7 for a short time.
Used a VM for 10 on the 8.1 host, although I can't open that now as I get an internal error, still not long till the launch and I do the upgrade.

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 Post Posted: Fri Jul 24, 2015 3:50 pm 
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jaylach wrote:
I also lost a new email contact but still had the piece of paper with the info so no loss at all.
Paper, the ultimate backup! :rofl2:


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 Post Posted: Fri Jul 24, 2015 5:47 pm 
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LOL! Yes it can be, Doddie. :mrgreen:

Sigh, I MAY end up losing the Win 8.1 side of my dual boot on the media system, haven't decided yet. No issues but I probably have a better solution for having Win 8.1 available. I almost have to keep a dual on my laptop though, some aspects just don't work properly without Win 7 so it is not practical to go with just 10. At least with Win 8.1 the system no longer sees itself as an Asus and some utilities fail saying that they only work on an Asus system.

The reason I'm considering removing the Win 8.1 side of my dual boot is that little 40GB drive I mentioned that was so handy when I melted down. That still gives me Win 8.1 just by plugging in the drive.

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 Post Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2015 7:43 pm 
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OK I did it. My media system is no longer a dual boot, it is just a dual boot... :mrgreen:

I used EasyBCD to remove the 8.1 install and then EaseUS Partition Master to re-do the partitions on the fly. All seems well. I still consider it a dual boot due to that 40GB drive with 8.1... or at least 8.1 when I get around to upgrading from its current 8 install.

Right now if I want to use the 40GB drive I need to plug it in to the external cables going to my mother board but will end up mounting internal. To use it I will just go to my selectable boot menu (F-12 on my system) and launch. I will also isolate the drive so that Windows 7 does not see by removing the drive letter in Drive Management. I may also try the 'Hide Partition' option in EaseUS Partition Master which I suspect may do the same thing, we shall see. :mrgreen:

Speaking of EaseUS Partition Master... it is one of the most awesome FREE utilities I've ever seen. Here is what my partition setup looked like before re-doing with EaseUS.
<Win 7 ~146GB><Win 8.1 ~146GB><Working ~49GB><Data ~590GB>
First I delete the 8.1 partition which leaves me a 146GB unallocated space in an inconvenient place. I NEED to be able to expand a partition to the left rather than the right. As with Disk Management in Windows EaseUS does not offer an expansion to the left but DOES offer the option to Merge partitions. It also offers the option to Move a partition but I did not play with that... at least not yet. ;)

So I merged the now empty 8.1 partition, working and data. This step DID require a re-boot to finish but that was not need in any following steps. The REALLY cool thing here is that it does not just merge the files which could cause issues with duplicate file names and such. What it does is to merge the partitions in to one with a folder for each drive merged.

So now I have a huge partition with 2 folders. I shrink the partition enough for a new partition that will still hold both folders and then move the folders to the new partition. So now I have my Win 7 partition followed by 2 very large partitions. Of course I could be done already if I had just done the initial merge and then shrunk that partition to leave the partition size I wanted for my working or 'scratch' drive but I wanted the data at the end of the drive.

So just a bit of cleanup to do. The partition that now is between the Win 7 and data partitions is shrunk to the size I want for my working partition. Then I merge the left over with the data partition.

Here is the working result. The above sounds like this took forever and the initial merge when EaseUS setup the folders representing the original drives DID take quite a while. After that it was all 'on the fly'.
Attachment:
partition-graphic.PNG
partition-graphic.PNG [ 3.5 KiB | Viewed 11950 times ]

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 Post Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2015 8:51 pm 
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Jay, I mentioned not being able to dual boot Win 7 on an 8.1 machine because of something called "secure boot". Here's some info about it.FYI

hardware manufacturers had to fulfil a range of requirements for the systems they built, and one of those requirements had people worried. Windows 8 required machines to support a feature called UEFI Secure Boot. Secure Boot protects against malware that interferes with the boot process in order to inject itself into the operating system at a low level. When Secure Boot is enabled, the core components used to boot the machine must have correct cryptographic signatures, and the UEFI firmware verifies this before it lets the machine start. If any files have been tampered with, breaking their signature, the system won't boot.

This is a desirable security feature, but it has an issue for alternative operating systems: if, for example, you prefer to compile your own operating system, your boot files won't include a signature that Secure Boot will recognize and authorize, and so you won't be able to boot your PC.

However, Microsoft's rules for the Designed for Windows 8 logo included a solution to the problem they would cause: Microsoft also mandated that every system must have a user-accessible switch to turn Secure Boot off, thereby ensuring that computers would be compatible with other operating systems. Microsoft's rules also required that users be able to add their own signatures and cryptographic certificates to the firmware, so that they could still have the protection that Secure Boot provides, while still having the freedom to compile their own software.


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 Post Posted: Sat Jul 25, 2015 8:56 pm 
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While I have not looked at it, except at a glance, I would assume that the 'Switch' is the settings option in my BIOS for UEFI.

Thanks for the info. :)

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