As my Christmas holiday were really long, I decided to use the occasion to reorganize all my hardware, with the new pieces I got during the last months. I started by putting all together moving RAM here and there, HD's and so on.
Once the candidate final machine was set, it was the time to start installing operating systems.
The first idea was to replace my Haiku development machine with this new one, but this, was to have had 60GB(20+40) so, it was enough space to have all of them: Haiku, Linux, and if all was ok, try a Windows 7. I would not expect that guys from Redmond were going to punish me so much for setting Windows the last in the queue.
So I started with Linux, to get the grub ready, and create within Linux all the partition. Then I went with 2 installations of Haiku: First one, the Alpha release and the second one with a fresh build.
All fine, all so nice with my new desktop, resynced all SVNs did some commits.
Then there was the 40GB HD reserved ONLY for the gigantic OS (even the HD was set as first HD in the IDE bus). After installation I was still happy as Win7 was more or less running smoothly in a moderate machine (Athlon Thunderbird 1,2GHz 768RAM).
All problems came or better said, they showed up trying to set Grub to boot Windows7.
Although I was sure I was pointing to the same partition I keep getting a message "BOOTMGR Missing".
Browsing and browsing I arrived to a really concerning post in the Ubuntu forums:
Quoting Belboz99:
"Just now I realized that Win7 creates at least 2 partitions when you install it, even though you may have only one selected and formatted for it's use."
Ok I thought, no way, I already checked the table and there is no new partition on that disk(40GB windows dedicated one with spare unpartitioned space), Also is impossible to fit another partition on the other disk as it is full with Linux and Haiku.
Checking 2 posts below I can quote from ramzai:
"And what is even worse, Win7 may put its bootloader to other existing FAT or NTFS partitions, even on the other hd, as it was in my case. I installed Win7 to (hd1,2) and then found bootmgr file on the (hd0,2) partition with music and video files."
Oh oh... then I started reviewing carefully all partitions... and there you are, a BFS one, suddenly became a NTFS...
WIN7 installation just went over my disk, even having free unpartitioned space on the same disk it was getting installed it went to the other disk, Found a partition of an unrelevant type (BFS, the first Haiku one), set it to NTFS, FORMATTED IT, and wrote there a bootloader. Win7 just overwrote my Haiku development partition, for just placing its bootloader!!
yeah Microsoft, while fixing all the mess and reinstalling, no opensource was written, you achieved it. I am just really thankful that you did not choose to crash my critical haiku data partition, or the sources one.
