Problem partitioning dual-boot

[John G. Heim]

From: "Michael Tautschnig" <mt at debian.org>
To: <linux-fai at uni-koeln.de>
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2011 5:04 PM
>> >Did you, possibly together with a co-worker, actually try that
>> >route of manually
>> >repairing the Windows install? If yes, did it do any good?
>>
>> Yes, I just tried that and it did work. So at the moment, I have a
>> working Win7/linux machine with the linux part installed via FAI.
>> The message the Windows repair said was that there was a problem
>> with the Windows startup options, asked me if I wanted to repair
>> them and reboot. I said I did and it rebooted.
>
> Is that a sort of acceptable solution to you? I'm still pretty eager to 
> figure
> out what the root cause of those troubles is, but I'd be happy if at 
> leastwe
> had a temporary solution that works out for you (and doesn't cause an 
> awful= lot
> of overhead).

Oh, yes. In my previous message, I almost included a paragraph talking about 
how it is going to be difficult to justify to my boss to let me continue to 
work on this. She is going to want me to move on.

> I've tried more searches on the web and all I found so far hinted at 
> problems
> with resizing the disk. Which approach do you use to free up space for 
> Linux?
> Does memory serve me correctly in that you don't actually touch the 
> Windows
> system partition and only drop some additional partition?

That is correct. Well, sort of. See below.

> Pages such as
> http://linuxexchange.org/questions/746/resizing-with-gparted-makes-other-wi=
ndows-7-partition-unusable
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/security-admin/dual-booting-linux=
> -and-windows-7-the-0xc0000225-error/
>
> seem to describe the very same error that you are seeing, but both of them
> relate it to a previous resizing attempt.

Oh, now there's an idea of what might be weird about my install... So as I 
mentioned, I install Win7 via an autounattend.xml file. I create a Windows 
partition (happens to be 40Gb) and a second partition with whatever is left 
and format it as ntfs. The reason I do that is that I found that if I didn't 
create the second partition, the Windows installer would open a dialog box 
and ask me what to do with the rest of the disk. Since the installer doesn't 
speak, I couldn't answer the question. To make it stop doing that, I 
configured the autounattend.xml file to create the second partition as drive 
D: and format it as ntfs. But I'll bet that if I could tell the Windows 
installer to forget about the rest of the disk, the FAI install would work. 
I'll bet Windows is getting confused by losing its D: partition.

An experiment that would confirm this would be to do the Win 7 install and 
then use any bootable CD with fdisk or parted on it (like an FAI CD) and 
delete that drive D:. I'll bet that would create the same problem as the FAI 
install.  In fact, the beauty of it is that I don't even have to mess up my 
working dual boot machine.  I have a machine at home I can try it on.

I'll let you know.