For posterity, I will now record my actions that resulted in the installation of Windows 7 to my hard drive. Listen closely, for it is a sad, sad tale.

Maybe not so sad: the XP install I had was showing it’s age as boots took minutes and things were just generally slow. And since Windows 7 was discounted to 30-ish dollars for students, I figured I might as well get a modern OS and refresh everything in one kick (I figured trying to wrangle a copy of Windows from MSNDNAA through my university would be a pain, and more trouble than it was worth. Probably should’ve found out).

So, here’s the first hurdle: it was quite unclear what I was buying. There is an option to ship some disks out to you in addition to the access to download the update, and the site was not making it clear whether or not I was getting an iso, and upgrade executable, or both. If there was no iso, then having the disks would be extremely handy. If there was an iso, then the disks would be a redundant waste of money. To be safe, I got the disks, and discovered a few seconds later that they did give you an iso. It’s not that big a deal, but it still irks me that they need to assume their users are idiots so that you ultimately don’t know what you’re getting (probably should’ve googled it, but… yeah, probably should have. Feel free to heap shame on me for failing to do so).

So, anyways, I shuffle some data off the windows partition (although not all of it, so I lost some music. I think), wipe, and try installing. Hangs on expanding files (0%). Hmm… One night down, burn it slower, and install it successfully. Then I find out I shouldn’t have wiped my windows partition, since it’s only an upgrade key, and it needs to install over an old windows. Bust out the xp disc, reinstall, then install windows 7, key works, and the birds are singing. Now it’s time to stick grub back into the MBR (master boot record) so I can dual boot Windows and Ubuntu again.

Ominous drum roll…

So I boot up my Ubuntu live disc, and fire up gparted. And it appears that my Ubuntu partition has disappeared. Strange. Since I burned the second Windows disc from Ubuntu, the XP or Windows 7 installation must have done something to the partition scheme. Looking up how to recover damaged partition tables, I installed testdisk, learned how to use it, and took a look around. Apparently, the partition was there in the partition table, but it had somehow become a primary partition (when it was originally a logical) and hence dropped off the face of the earth as far as gparted was concerned.

Since I was using a full complement of partitions, I knocked off my swap (having 4Gb is good for something other than huge fluid sims) and put the lost partition on as a primary. Then I cp -R’d all the contents to my /home partition, and then rebuilt the extended partition. Since I also had to shuffle my data around, it took a while, until I finally got my partition scheme back the way I liked it. So, I cp -R’d the contents of the Ubuntu partition back, installed grub to the MBR, and rebooted.

Since grub didn’t have a menu.lst to go off of, I learned very quickly how to boot from grub with

set root=(hdX,0)

linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sdaY

initrd /initrd.img

boot

It gets old after doing it 2 times.

The boot failed: it turned out that sudo was owned by someone else. Fixed that with a livecd, tried to boot again. After the 3rd or 4th boot, it dawned on me that everything was owned by root. That happens when you do sudo cp -R /media/ubuntu-partition /media/somewhere-else. So, I gave up, figured I’d screwed myself, and reinstalled Ubuntu. Verily, I tell thee that having a separate /home was a very good idea. You should do it too.

So, I learned somethings, and I’m much less restrained with partition editors than I used to be. Now it’s time to actually finish something so that I have other stuff to write about.

So, I installed Windows 7 this morning. Or was it yesterday night? Or yesterday morning? At any rate, one thing led to another and I finally got here, where I have a working windows 7 and kind of working ubuntu. Unfortunately, I learned about cp -aR too late, and now I have a whole installation of ubuntu that has screwed up permissions. It is almost not worth the effort I put into trying to save it. Maybe it isn’t, since I’ll probably have permissions issues biting me in the ass more frequently than usual.

Live and learn.

Oh, and I have some progress on the head and bow. Head has a hacky approach, and the bow may or may not look good. Haven’t taken a look yet. At any rate, I’m going to sleep. I may write up my adventures later. Maybe.

Also! http://samandfuzzy.com/ is my new drug. And we’re going to see Avatar tomorrow, so I can finally have an opinion on the matter.

So, just to follow up with my gripes about Ubuntu, it turns out that upgrading was the cause of my troubles. Doing a couple of clean installs (first to find corrupt libraries killing init within 3 seconds of boot, second to find I had installed x86 inadvertently, and the final one to get x86_64) got me to a working install, and I must say, it’s pretty good to be back out from under XP. Once I get the chance and funds, I’ll have to get me two copies of Windows 7, especially that 30$ student edition (baring any revelations that said copies are crippled in some way) so I have to reformat. I also learned how to ‘burn’ an iso to my usb disk (why yes, it is an actual tiny usb hd), which means I won’t have to burn another disc, hopefully forever. Which works out, since I had just run out of discs to burn (although it’s just smaller than your average DVD image: I’ll probably have to upgrade my drive to an actual flash dongle).

Also, I’m working on another software project. I’ll post details once it does something more than display pretty boxes in the wrong proportions.

Just so you know I’m not dead or anything.

So I’ve been having troubles with Ubuntu for the last few days: first, upgrading the desktop causes a cyclic restart after logging in: sound is broken again, as I remember putting good hours in making that work: and now I couldn’t find the command to upgrade without a gui. For someone concerned with gaining some server market share, that particular command is not very easy to find. Mind you, I’m not going to jump ship: I’ve also tried to concurrently install Mandrivia, and that’s not working out too well either.