dual booting netbook complications...

well, I used to use edgy back in the day and then hopped onto various distros as my programming classes called for using linux. though, since windows 7 debuted and i rarely used my last flavor of linux on my previous laptop,and i decided to dump it and fully install windows 7 professional on it. as a gamer who hates trying to use WINE to work applications and diagnosing audio problems, i decided to just stick with windows.

well i recently built a desktop and i have windows 7 professional installed on that, and then windows 7 professional installed on my netbook as well.

i'm taking programming classes and our teacher wants us to use the linux environment again, so here i am again installing linux, though i decided with xubuntu due to the interface and the N280 processor, and figured i could take a shot of learning a different interface.

the netbook came preinstalled with 3 partitions (a primary/boot, backup, and system recovery). foolishly, i thought i didn't need the recovery partition since there was one preinstalled from ASUS but that contained data to reformat to the factory Windows XP settings, in which case i didn't feel like i needed that.

it's a 160 gb hard drive, 72 used for the primary/boot, and 72 used for the backup. the rest were recovery partitions used by the OS and then by ASUS.

well while rushing through it i wiped out a partition for windows 7, rather than the one from ASUS.

i thought, well, system recovery... i don't need that since i've done this numerous times, and i have... just not without a computer with no optical drive and never with windows 7.

apparently windows 7 will not even boot due to me deleting that partition.

my goal: i don't use linux that often, and since i have a netbook i really don't want to get into compatibility issues with windows since that is my primary OS and i do not want to use the grub loader. i felt i could reinstall windows and use wubi to install linux since i won't be using linux all that often.

i copied the windows 7 image onto a USB drive and i rebooted using that. the USB drive will not install a fresh copy of windows because it 'cannot find the device drivers'.

i have a CD from ASUS with the support drivers and everything on it, so i copied the files from the CD and put that onto the flash drive and the installer did not find the files on there either. i tried booting with the flash drive and it won't load it.

what are my options here? i figured you all would know better than Windows users since more of you would most likely know about dual booting on a netbook.

 

You don't need to reinstall. Follow the instructions for making a USB installable usb disk for win 7.

Launch the repair for Win7. This might take a while. I've had repairs for vista/7 take up to an hour before!.

Next you should only need 10-15 for Ubuntu. I'm running my work desktop off of an 8gb thumbdrive and it works fine! Install to there

GRUB should work fine. Howcome you don't want to use GRUB?

 

because i've had complications using grub while updating BIOS features and while primarily using windows as my operating system.

and i like to have ~20 gig just in case i start getting into it and installing software trying to make things work on linux again.

i tried the repair, and it comes up with 'the system is not able to perform repair, please select an option below' and i can select a combination of repair and restore options. none of the restore options won't work since i don't have the system restore, and the repair startup won't work since i guess i removed some boot files needed from the partition.

 

It's been quite a while since I've done a fix of Vista/7 from the command line. There is some command that can fix the MBR and the bootloader ... someone else can chime in on that.

Have you thought about just installing Ubuntu to the USB Stick or buying a SDHC card? I boot my netbook from the SDHC.

 

i do have a 8gb SD card and that could work i suppose, but what are the performance differences? i'm always tempted to run strenuous software to see how far i can take any machine.

 

For win7 it's bootrec, probably what you need is bootrec /fixboot. Details here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927392

 

thanks! i'll try that when i get home from work.

 

this repair utility will not even recognize that windows is even installed.

 

It's sluggish on my netbook and runs the same speed on a desktop/laptop. I have not tried Ubuntu on the regular hard drive on my netbook so I can't comment on its speed versus a drive.

Did you format it by mistake?

 

Erm... hm. If your recovery partition is still intact, can't you use F11 after POST to get into it and recover windows? Or maybe your MBR is trashed. In that case you can try bootrec /fixmbr

An easy out is of course a USB CD-ROM drive.

 

yes i formatted over the preinstalled recovery partition.

well it turns out that the reason i couldn't do anything with the windows partition is because the computer did not recognize that i even had a harddrive on my machine, thus, it wouldn't allow me to install windows anywhere.

i loaded up the live CD and just deleted the remaining windows partition and then it worked.

now i have to remember how i installed my C compiler again >:[