Upon reboot, my motherboard failed to recognize one of my internal disks during POST! Bizarre and very worrying. In desperation, I switched my disks from RAID to IDE in the BIOS, and hey presto, they were detected again!

When I switched back to RAID the disks seemed to be working again, but GRUB gave me an Error 2 at stage 1.5. I subsequently found out that Error 2 means, “you will be trying to fix this for the rest of your natural life”. I think it actually means device not found, so off I went with my Super GRUB CD, and attempt to boot using that, then using the GRUB command line. No joy.

So I re-booted from XP CD, went to Recovery Console and ran fixboot.
Everything’s working again - I’m a lucky man.

I have to vehemently disagree with previous posts along the line of “it’s not the tool, it’s the user”. If Linux is aiming at a consumer market it absolutely needs to be more friendly. When things go wrong, you can’t seriously expect your average user to be worrying if they’ve got the right version of gcc!

I also disagree for the simple reason that the installer has no doubt had tens if not hundreds of bugs raised on it during development, so it can quite easily be the tool and not the user.

I also had ‘Windows Vista’ (security notice W32/vista.os.bloat) affect some of my machines, although very isolated incidents, unlike the issues we had with ‘Windows XP’ (security notice W32/XP.worm.g!f9007a93).

It looks like, for the time being, the ‘Microsoft’ hacker group are not able to keep track with recent trends in security and anti-bloatware. I hope they might stop their hacker crusade against the world, one which has already cost business almost a trillion dollars (and I am talking 2004 dollars!) in additional IT costs due to worms.

Jonathan, the 7.04 installer detected the Windows install previously and installed correctly leaving the Windows partition untouched.

This time, however, the 7.10 installer didn’t see the Windows partition and unfortunately deleted it (no, it wasn’t just the boot section which was changed).

Sure I am partly to blame, I am not denying that. The trouble is, as Paul correctly pointed out, I am reasonably technically savvy. What hope would a non-techie have avoiding this issue (remember this wasn’t an issue with 7.04, the partition editor there worked like a charm).

Have any Microsoft Operating systems ever done any differently to what Ubuntu is doing now? Nope. At least Ubuntu does actually scan for other OS’s.

Its the not tool, it is the person using it who is to blame.

Now you see why my logic is undeniable, and why millions say, “OMG, U R SUPR SMART! K, BAI!”

Conor, nope the partition is gone alright unfortunately. I did check that.

I have been running machines with two OSes for quite several years now and this is the first time this has happened to me. Still, no biggie, no data was lost, only time.

As for Ubuntu and wireless it worked first time with my old Dell. Haven’t tried it in Bootcamp on a Mac yet though.

Installing two OSes on one Hard Drive should only be attempted if you know what you are doing.

Are you sure the partition is actually deleted Tom or did Ubuntu just remove its own bootloader? Should be easy enough to fix.

At least Microsoft didn’t ruin Thanksgiving

Doubly so considering Tom isn’t a layman, if a chap like Tom can miss the warning then my mom, uncle, grandma and sister all definitely will.