[ale] Why Dual-Booting Sucks ...

[JD]

On 10/17/2014 06:21 AM, Paul Cartwright wrote:
> On 10/16/2014 05:07 PM, JD wrote:
>> After 30+ minutes of Win7 x64 patches today, I dutifully rebooted a laptop.
>> After the BIOS and memory checks, there was the GRUB RESCUE prompt staring at me.
> yeah, that is the one gotcha for dual-booting, Dell's for sure. You lose
> the restore option, even if you left the restore partition on the HD..
> I have not figured out how to make an ISO to restore the HD to original
> windows, after doing the dual boot, but thankfully I have never had to
> do that. maybe the thing to do would be to put a second disk in, clone
> it, then make it dual-boot.. ah next time:) windows 10:)

Boot-recovery disk fixed it on the first try. Don't know what it did, but isn't
that the point?

During the first reboot after the fix, it rebooted twice to finish installing
more cruft and ran really, really, really, slowly for another 10 min.  Was about
to boot into the linux partition and run badblocks on the partitions (I have a
few), then everything got fast like any Core i5 should. Spinning 7200rpm disk -
I don't trust SSDs - perhaps in 5 more years after they are proven. ;)

When it is more convenient, running badblocks must happen just to fight bit-rot.
The machine is over 3 yrs old and Windows hasn't been reinstalled - just shifted
and migrated to a larger HDD ($40 buys a lot of storage) a few years ago.

For creating images which I only do for Window (NEVER, EVER, Linux), I've used
both partimage and fsarchive.  Some partimage "image files" are backed up on
other storage around here ... let me check ... er ... I did have it backed up.

$ find /Backups/Dell*
/Backups/Dell-1535
/Backups/Dell-1535/Dell-Utility
/Backups/Dell-1535/Dell-Utility/39MB.img.000
/Backups/Dell-1535/Dell-Utility/README-jp.txt
/Backups/Dell-1558

The empty Dell-1558/ directory is scary. I could have needed it TODAY! There is
a MSFT backup set somewhere, but an attempt to recover that for a different
machine failed completely a few months ago. I don't trust it.

Looks like creating a new set of images will be happening. Appears the OS backup
disk on the network ran out of free storage and I got lazy.

There's always something.