Angel Blue01 Posted May 24, 2009 Share Posted May 24, 2009 Shortly after I got my laptop a couple of years ago, with Vista Home Premium, I decided to give openSUSE Linux a short. SUSE setup resized my Windows (NTFS) partition down to 60 GB (120 GB hard disk), created a / (sda6), swap (sda5) and a /home (sda7) partition out of the remaining space and I was happy. For the next year and a half I was fine booting off the SUSE liveCD, having it reformat my / partition, mounting sda7 as /home as it should be, and leaving my NTFS partition alone. It had no trouble installing the GRUB bootloader and I could happily reboot into Windows and access its partition (sda2) from SUSE as well. With openSUSE 11.2 in January however although I carefully made sure setup didn't touch my Windows partition, it was unusable. Not only was Windows unbootable but SUSE could no longer detect it at all. After a lot of trial and error I was able to use some data recovery utilities to recover some of my data, the rest I got from a backup. And so I've been Windows-less with this machine for the last 5 months. But at last I need to use some Windows-only programs so I need to get Vista reinstalled. The problem is that my Toshiba laptop came with a couple of recovery DVDs instead of a real Windows disc that seem to be image-based recovery discs of the hard drive as it was in the box. Ordinary Windows setup lets you select a partition to install Windows on of course but I'm not sure about these recovery discs. So how should I reinstall Vista on this machine without losing my working Linux partitions? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lars77 Posted May 24, 2009 Share Posted May 24, 2009 You could borrow a retail vista DVD from someone. With a retail Vista DVD you could reinstall Vista using the product key on the sticker under your laptop. Other than that I'm not sure, maybe check with Toshiba if they'd be willing to sell you a set of Vista-only discs for your laptop. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
notuptome2004 Posted May 24, 2009 Share Posted May 24, 2009 just downlaod and install windows 7 RC since window s7 will be relased in the coming months it makes no since for ya to go back to vista this late in the game Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yusuf M. Veteran Posted May 24, 2009 Veteran Share Posted May 24, 2009 You can order a Windows Vista disc (32-bit or 64-bit) from Microsoft for a minimal fee (click here). All you need to supply is your billing address, credit card information, 25-character product key, and media choice (CD or DVD). With it, you'll be able to format your hard drive and install Windows Vista from scratch. It shouldn't be a problem since you were able to recover your data. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Angel Blue01 Posted May 24, 2009 Author Share Posted May 24, 2009 I do have access to a regular OEM Vista Business DVD from another machine but would it take my serial and install Home Premium? I'll install Windows 7 RC1 for now :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lars77 Posted May 24, 2009 Share Posted May 24, 2009 I do have access to a regular OEM Vista Business DVD from another machine but would it take my serial and install Home Premium? I think it would? With retail Vista DVDs all the Vista versions are on the same DVD (& yes they take OEM keys too). My guess is that OEM Vista DVDs are similar. You'd find out pretty quickly since entering the serial happens in the first 2 minutes of the Vista install ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+KibosJ Subscriber² Posted May 24, 2009 Subscriber² Share Posted May 24, 2009 OEM Discs also include all the versions :) Products keys from laptops seem to work fine too. I've swapped between Retail and OEM Discs/keys and have never had problems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Growled Member Posted May 24, 2009 Member Share Posted May 24, 2009 If you didn't touch your Vista install, everything should still be there where you left it. I would just reinstall openSuse 11.1 or any other distro to install a working grub to get it it. I haven't tried 11.2, but can you not reinstall grub from Yast? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Angel Blue01 Posted May 24, 2009 Author Share Posted May 24, 2009 If you didn't touch your Vista install, everything should still be there where you left it. I would just reinstall openSuse 11.1 or any other distro to install a working grub to get it it.I haven't tried 11.2, but can you not reinstall grub from Yast? I just noticed my mistake, it was 11.1 that messed up my Vista partition to the point that gparted can't read it (see screenshot)! I'm sorry about the mistake :blush: I ran all the GRUB related recovery utilities off the openSUSE 11.1 DVD as soon as I noticed the problem. Of course, the next thing I noticed was that SUSE couldn't read the NFTS partition at all. I tried an Ubuntu liveCD and that couldn't read it either. And different utilities I've tried have mostly failed to read it some even deny its existence. I've tried editing GRUB via Yast and that didn't help any. As much as I know I didn't change anything related to NTFS partition -I didn't touch it- SUSE setup caused the problem. My plan right now is to use gparted to format it as NTFS, install Windows 7 7100 and then use the SUSE 11.1 DVD to restore GRUB so I can dualboot my new Windows 7 RC and my existing SUSE installation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markwolfe Veteran Posted May 25, 2009 Veteran Share Posted May 25, 2009 If you are interested in trying to repair, the Linux utility testpart does a great job of checking your partitioning and making it match the filesystems it sees on the data portion of the hard drive. (Y) Also, I can help look at partitions manually if you copy/paste the results of an fdisk -l (that's a lowercase letter "L", not the number one - command must be done as root/sudo) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Angel Blue01 Posted May 25, 2009 Author Share Posted May 25, 2009 Thanks markjensen! Unfortunately I've already reformatted the partition as NTFS in gparted. I'm attempting to install Win7 RC1. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slippery Posted May 25, 2009 Share Posted May 25, 2009 Why even bother with vista? - go for windows7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scaramonga Posted May 25, 2009 Share Posted May 25, 2009 Why even bother with vista? - go for windows7 +1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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