Is there a sector surgeon in the house?!

Post Reply New Topic

I thank you. That helped.

I only have 1 GB of ram, so the 2 GB presently set aside for Mint's swap partition is more than enough. Then, I have an all-purpose "syswap" FAT32 that is way oversized at 6 GB, so that is available as a common area without any system ever needing to write into another system's partition. And, today it struck me to simply run Mint from the disk and format its partitions from there just before doing the installation ... so now I am off to do some reading to find out how to do that!

That is a sign that Vista/Win7 has changed the partition layout. The new alignment confuses a lot of older programs, including XP/2k. It's actually normal for them to see duplicate/missing partitions. Ironically you should be mostly fine if you don't do any partition operations with them. Doing so can give very unpredictable results, including corruptions not limited to the Win7 partitions.


I'm not sure if Easeus is compatible with the new alignment. Anyway once it's corrupted, you may have to start the whole disk from scratch.


Yes, that is the recovery partition. It has 2 purpose: 1. Like the name implied, for recovery. 2. For BitLocker.
Win7 can only create that when there's unallocated space, which means Win7 created its partition in your case.


Volume shadow copy is used to keep older versions of data, not the current one. So, you will only lost recovery/backup data. It's more likely due to partition corruption.


If you want to avoid these issues. Use linux/XP/2k to create all the partitions first. You don't have to format partitions not used by that OS but make sure there's no unallocated space before installing Win7. And don't use Win7 for any partition operations if you intend to use other tools.

Just to clarify:

1. HDCP is an encryption standard for digital connections (eg: DVI/HDMI/display port between your display card and monitors). There is a key revocation mechanism for newer devices to refuse connection to blacklisted non-compliant devices.
2. Tilt Bit is the mechanism for a driver to report possible tempering. Vista+ will poll that every few ms. So far it's only used on display and sound card drivers.
3. There's a way for M$ to blacklist certain drivers that are found to leak protected contents.

None of these is related to your problem. Your hardware is also likely old enough to predate any of these initiatives.

Last edited by CloudWalker on 23 Mar 2010, 6:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Okay, I think I got it right this time. After figuring out I did not need to figure out how to use formatting commands in "Live" mode, I simply had Win7 delete my NTFS "placeholder partitions" and used the Mint installation options to set and format its three. Mint still did/does not see any other operating systems on my machine, but it did see my second drive correctly -- 2k and XP cannot do that! -- and slipped itself right on in without complaint.

I made Mint's system partition primary and the other two logical, but now Win7 thinks there are five primary partitions on the drive. I hope it does not go rat me out somewhere ...! !

Now off the see EasyBCD and a Mint bootup ...

Oops. I forgot the screen shot, and to report Win7 complained a bit and I had to do a reset and skip over its "repair startup" routine (that does not work anyway) after installing Mint! Win7 will either fall into step and keep up or be gone.

[img][650:369]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5489953/mintinew.jpg[/img]

Vista/Win7 has a tendency to show partitions with unsupported file system as primary. That should explain the disk with linux on it.

Sure, I suspected something like that. And, I think the Win7 boot problem might have had to do with some things you had previously told me about the way these systems keep track of time. Mint had checked the time during installation, but it was four hours off (behind) even though it was seeing the correct time zone ... then Win7 was also four hours behind after the Mint installation ... and after correcting the clock there in Win7 (and it cannot do that automatically), now Mint also shows the time correctly. So, I suspect that resolves at least today's boot troubles!