Running WinXP Pro in a VMWare Virtual Machine on Ubuntu

I had been interested in having a virtual system since the early days of Windows 95, when my system was crashing far more often than it had done under DOS or OS/2. I had hoped to reduce the severity of those crashes by running Windows inside a virtual machine on OS/2. To that end, I bought a copy of VMware in the late 1990s. I never got around to trying it out, though. As I recall, there were performance and complexity issues. Moreover, I wasn't prepared to take the plunge into Linux, which seemed likely to involve a relatively steep learning curve. Now, much later, Windows had become much more stable. I was running Windows XP Professional. But crashes could still happen. Frankly, I still found that I had to reboot the machine daily, and completely shut it down for a minute or so every couple of days, to insure that the system would not begin to behave in some squirrely fashion right in the middle of a project. Ubuntu Linux had emerged; it seemed to be something I could become functional in without too much of a time investment; I had acquired hardware that could run virtual machine software more easily; and I also had a brief window in which to explore the matter. I was ready to try running a Windows virtual machine on a Linux (Ubuntu) platform. Stability was one reason, then, for my interest in using virtual machines. A more important reason was that I wanted to gain access to more than 2.7GB of RAM. As I have described in more detail in another post, I was experiencing a lot of system slowdowns in running various processes, and was therefore interested in making greater use of RAM, possibly in the form of a RAM drive, instead of waiting for the Windows system to swap things in and out of a pagefile located on a physical hard drive. To use more RAM, I would need a 64-bit operating system. In another post, I have presented the concerns that led me to choose Ubuntu instead of Microsoft's x64 flavor of Windows XP Professional, and also instead of the new Windows Vista operating system. (It developed, in the course of the research presented in this post, that Vista would also have been an inferior choice for purposes of implementing VMware.) I had been looking at several different virtual machine products, including VirtualBox, XenSource, Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007, and VMware. I don't remember all of my reasons for deciding to start with VMware. (VMware's FAQs provide some.) Generally, it seemed that people were quite positive on it, and that it was the most industrial-strength virtual machine product available. Virtual PC 2007 ran on Windows only, which was not what I wanted; besides, I really wanted to get away from a scenario in which I would continue to be dependent on Microsoft. VMware offered several free products. It seemed that I should begin with the VMware Converter -- the Starter version, that is, as distinct from the Enterprise version. The purpose of this product was to "convert your physical machines to virtual machines in minutes." That is, I would turn my desktop computer's sprawling Microsoft Windows XP Professional installation into a nice package that I could open up and run from inside Ubuntu. I would thus have simultaneous access to both operating systems. While continuing to do things in Windows, I could also begin to learn how to do them in Linux, toward the goal of transitioning away from Windows over the long haul without losing my ability to get things done in the meantime. It appeared that I would still be able to add new programs to Windows XP. If I added them to my physical dual boot system, they would not be part of a virtual machine until I created another virtual machine that contained them. If, instead, I added them to my virtual Windows setup, they would exist only in there, and not on the virtual machine. This was OK, for two reasons: (1) I didn't want to have to keep rebooting my Ubuntu system every time I wanted to do something in Windows, and (2) I wanted to begin doing more things in Ubuntu and fewer in Windows, so hopefully I would be adding some of my new capabilities in Ubuntu rather than adding them to a Windows installation. One long-term advantage of the Ubuntu and VMware combination, as I saw it, was that I might be able to avoid devoting the large amounts of time that it could take to reinstall and reconfigure Windows, Office, and all my other software, every time I made a substantial change to the hardware in my machine, or wanted to upgrade my operating system, or needed to eliminate the creeping slowdowns that seemed to accumulate in every Windows installation. Instead, from VMware's introduction to virtualization, it appeared that I would be able to install Windows and all that other stuff once, import it into a VMware virtual machine, and then run it on my laptop and on any other computer I might be using. I intended to use VMware to convert my physical machine -- my desktop computer's Windows installation -- to a virtual machine. I noticed that VMware would also convert some nonphysical assets to virtual machines. The list of convertible items, presented in VMware's FAQs, included virtual machines created by other programs. Specifically, for Microsoft's Virtual Server and Virtual PC, and for Symantec's LiveState Recovery program (now known as Backup Exec) you would use VMware's Virtual Machine Importer. VMware would also convert drive images created in Norton Ghost, version 9 or higher. That was interesting because Ghost 9.0 was backward-compatible with PowerQuest's Drive Image 7.0. (According to a post I read somewhere, Ghost 9 essentially gave up on Norton's old approach and adopted PowerQuest's superior technology instead, now that Symantec had acquired PowerQuest.) DI 7.0 was the next step newer than Drive Image 2002, which I used. It seemed very likely that DI 7.0 would work with images saved in DI 2002. In that case, it seemed that I could image any machine, using my Drive Image CD, and could then create a virtual machine out of it, using VMware. Moreover, my old Drive Image backups might thus be convertible into virtual machines that I could load without rebooting or reformatting any hard drives, if I wanted to go back in time. Looking ahead, likewise, I could save and, on the fly, could reload working snapshots of my system as it was at a given point in time. (On that basis, I began to wonder if I would also want a Windows-host version of VMware, so that I could take my own Windows setup, with all my assorted utilities, Microsoft Office settings, etc. to use on I wasn't yet sure whether I would want to use Norton Ghost to back up my VMware installation. I doubted it but, if I did, then I could see that the two might form a nice symbiotic relationship, and that it might be worth my while to upgrade from Drive Image. This would all have to happen within Windows. The FAQs page said that Converter would only run on certain versions of Windows (including XP). So now I understood what was, for me, the main functional difference between the Starter and Enterprise versions of VMware Converter. I didn't plan to run a large-scale operation, so I didn't need Enterprise. But you could use Enterprise to cold-clone a machine -- that is, you could use a boot disk to start a machine and make a virtual machine from it, without having to run its operating system. VMware, running on Windows, could not hot-clone a system running on, say, DOS, or Mac, or Linux. To make a virtual machine on a system like that, it seemed, you would have to download the appropriate version of some VMware product (e.g., the Linux version), install and run it on that machine, and then create your virtual version from inside that operating system. VMware's Virtualization Overview explained that there was a distinction between a "hosted" approach and a "hypervisor" approach to virtualization. I had thought VMware was a hosted approach, but now it seemed that was mistaken. The difference was that, in a hosted approach, you would install a host operating system, and would then run the virtualization software on that, whereas there would be no host operating system in a hypervisor approach: the virtualization software would be installed directly on the computer hardware, just as you would install an operating system like Windows or Linux. I wasn't too sure how this would work, so I continued my research. I wasn't too clear, at this point, what the relationship was, among VMware Converter, VMware Server, and VMware Player. (Somewhere along the line, I noticed that 64-bit (as distinguished from 32-bit) Ubuntu was supported only in an "Experimental" capacity, which was not entirely what I had hoped to see.) I noticed, from the FAQs, that Converter could import virtual machines created in Server and Player, but also that it could export virtual machines that would be compatible with Player and Server. The general idea seemed to be that Server would host the machines created by Converter, and then maybe you could use Player to run those machines on other computers. They provided more detail, but not necessarily more clarification on this point, in their Interoperability notes. (Later, I decided that one difference was that, in Server, you would create a virtual machine from scratch, by inserting the program drive and installing an operating system and other program software, whereas Converter, as just described, would create a virtual machine from a preexisting installation or image file.) I now had a 64-bit CPU, and anyway I didn't plan to have any 64-bit virtual machines operating as guests on my VMware setup. So I didn't worry about 64-bit guests. The only virtual machine I planned to have was 32-bit Windows XP Professional (which, according to their list, was fully supported by Converter, unlike DOS and Linux, which were experimental); and I planned to install that by using a virtual machine that would encapsulate everything contained in my existing WinXP setup -- so it didn't look like I would need VMware's instructions on how to create a virtual machine setup from scratch. The main exception seemed to be if I tried to create a virtual machine from an ISO (or maybe some other kind of) drive image. In that case, apparently I would want to have the virtual hardware setup already configured, within the empty virtual machine. For example, if my drive image was supposed to work with a networking connection, I would want to have that configured in advance. I began to sense that the drive image approach could involve some trial and error. VMware Converter, it seemed, would proceed in three steps: (1) Specify the source physical server, virtual machine or third-party format to convert. (2) Specify the destination format, virtual machine name, and location for the new virtual machine to be created. (3) Create/Convert to the destination virtual machine, and configure it. I was sure I would be looking at the VMware Converter User’s Manual in more detail later. Among the known issues that VMware attributed to Converter, one was that it would treat the first drive in a virtual machine as the boot drive. So in my case, where I booted from a SATA drive that came third in typical lists of my drives (such as that which appeared in XP's Disk Management, or in GParted), I would have to use a workaround that involved adjusting the BIOS within the virtual machine. Also, Converter would work only on the operating system that boot.ini points toward -- which, I assumed, would mean my Windows installation rather than Linux, since I understood boot.ini to be a Windows file. There were other items on the list of known issues, and I was sure the VMware Technology Network (containing links to discussion forums, communities, blogs, etc.) were just full of issues, but at this point there didn't seem to be anything standing in the way of my starting to use Converter. So now that I had an introductory sense of what Converter was, how did VMware Server relate to it? I needed, first, to sort out which version of Server we were talking about. According to the VMware products list, there was an ESX Server and just a plain old Server, and only the latter was free; and then, unmentioned in the products list, there was also a GSX Server providing "virtual infrastructure for enterprise IT administrators." ESX Server, likewise, appeared to be a heavy-duty setup for administrators. Unlike ESX Server, free Server was apparently not a bare-metal hypervisor program, but was instead a hosted virtualization product (see above) that, they said, would run "like an application" on "a wider variety of Linux and Windows host and guest operating systems than any server virtualization product on the market." I was content to focus, for now, on the free version, VMware Server. It looked like the primary distinction, between Server and Converter, was that you would use Converter to bring an existing drive image or physical machine into the virtual machine world, but then you would use Server to run and back up that virtual machine. So, according to the Server FAQs, the whole virtual machine would be saved as a single file, and you could use Server to "[e]valuate software in ready-to-run virtual machines without installation and configuration." There was actually a long list of Virtual Appliances that evidently you could fire up and run within Server. I checked that list and identified a few of potential interest, among the many that bore four- or five-star ratings. In the Content Management and Collaboration category, for instance, the most popular appliance, rating four stars, was the JanusVM freeware, described on its webpage as "software that allows you to surf the Internet without oppression or censorship, while protecting your privacy, security, and identity. It has advanced filtering capabilities for modifying web page content, managing cookies, controlling access, and removing ads, banners, pop-ups and other obnoxious Internet junk," compatible with Windows (2000/XP/2003) and Linux. As an example from the Operating Systems category, there was the Linux XP 2006 SR2 Virtual Appliance, described as "a Fedora-based, beginner-friendly desktop distribution that mimics the look and feel of Windows XP and provides extensive compatibility features with the Microsoft operating system." There were other Linux implementations as well (and a lot of overlap among the various categories). The Server FAQs explained that Server differed from VMware Workstation, which was geared toward software developers. The FAQs also confirmed that Server could create virtual machines. The "Getting Started" page for Server said that you could not have Server running on the same host machine as VMware Workstation or Player, but that you could install VMware Tools. According to the FAQs, VMware Player was a free download that behaved like an ordinary application and allowed the user to run multiple 32- and 64-bit operating systems, including virtual appliances (above), simultaneously. As an example, VMware suggested the Browser Appliance, which was apparently a virus-safe version of Firefox -- safe, because it ran in a virtual machine. (That appliance got only three stars from a total of 10 raters, however.) Player apparently supported Symantec's Backup Exec. Player would not create virtual machines and would not coexist on the same machine with other VMware products. VMware also offered other software and information that also looked like it might be useful. VMware Tools (available in several different versions) were said to be very important for the guest machine. There was a Virtual Machine Mobility Planning Guide, a VMware Server Virtual Machine Guide, a VMware Server Administration Guide, and a Guest Operating System Installation Guide with updates. So I decided to start with Converter. I downloaded and installed it on the machine whose Windows XP installation I wanted to capture in a virtual machine. It asked me to designate which hard drives I wanted to include. This made me realize that the resulting virtual machine file would be just as huge as necessary to accommodate TMP files and other stuff that really didn't need to be in there. So I did some cleaning and pruning on my Windows drive. While this was going on, I was also browsing in other webpages, to see what other people had to say. I felt a little foolish for not doing this earlier when I saw a post by Bob on Development. He seemed to have just cruised right through the VMware process. I was probably being too cautious and thorough. But that was OK. I preferred to err in that direction. At this point in the process, I discovered that it was not necessary to download and install VMWare separately from Ubuntu. In other words, I didn't need to worry about downloading, unzipping, and installing separate .TAR files for Server or Player. Instead, Ubuntu comes with software that is pre-approved for use, and there are also other sources of software in several categories of diminishing stability. The way to gain access to a lot of this software, I found, was through Automatix. I installed Automatix. It put an icon under a subheading on Ubuntu's Applications menu. Through Automatix, I downloaded and installed a bunch of software. It was very easy -- just click on the box next to the package you want to download. I forgot that VMWare Server and VMWare Player cannot exist on the same machine, so I tried downloading them both. Automatix installed Player first, and then I had to go through a whole hassle to uninstall it and install Server. Because of some other distractions, I forgot about VMWare Converter. I ran VMWare Server. It instructed me to insert my book disc. I did. It began to construct a Windows installation from the WinXP install CD. I bailed out of that process. Along about this time, I began to get discouraged. For one thing, I was having basic hardware problems. I figured out that some of my struggles, in this post and in the previous one, were due to a faulty new motherboard, so I replaced it. With that out of the way, I was next able to identify that part of my problem, in booting Windows XP, was due to a problem with the LVPrcMon.sys driver, which was apparently the driver for my Logitech QuickCam. In lieu of hacking the registry at the recommended spot, I just uninstalled QuickCam in Add/Remove Programs and added an unflattering remark at a website that, I hoped, would help to inform others. That, and some other unrelated distractions, frustrated me. I was not making rapid progress. I was also concerned that maybe Ubuntu was not ready for prime time, at least not for me. For one thing, I knew that I would have to continue to run Microsoft Word for the indefinite future. The reason was that I had a lot of word abbreviations that I used frequently, when typing, to cut down on the number of keystrokes. There did not appear to be a way to import these keystrokes into OpenOffice Writer. I posted a question along those lines in one discussion thread where someone had developed a macro for this purpose. My problem was that I was not sophisticated enough in programming to adapt his macro to my needs. My question drew no response, presumably because (as I had tentatively verified in other searching) nobody yet had an answer. So it seemed that Word would continue to be essential, for me, until further notice. This was not to denigrate OpenOffice Writer in general, however. I had used it a fair amount, during these days, writing a paper on my laptop while doing all this tinkering on the desktop computer, and it had functioned pretty well. I noticed that sometimes the cursor was relocating itself to a place I had not requested, but that did not happen often enough to be frustrating or distracting. I had also tried using the OpenOffice database program. I imported a Microsoft Access database and went through the wizard to create a form, so that I could look at the table's contents. The wizard wouldn't let me get beyond its last step. It wasn't frozen – I could go back one step – but it wouldn't finish and display the form. I don't know what the problem was there. Another concern was that apparently Ubuntu's support of dual monitors was limited at this point. My browsing suggested that people were still very much at the level of writing code to obtain dual-monitor capability. I was feeling some time pressure and was not inclined to explore that sort of issue. Late on one very tired evening, I decided to run FIXMBR so that I could reboot Windows and go back to life as I had known it. The next morning, after a good night's sleep, I revisited my draft of this post and decided that I really should forge on, in hopes of gaining access to the full 4GB of installed RAM that had so preoccupied me from the beginning of this computer update project. As a test run, while doing other things on the Windows XP installation, I ran VMWare Converter on a DriveImage 2000 backup of the XP system. The DI image I selected, for this purpose, was a relatively small one, totaling about 4GB, containing an early snapshot of the WinXP Pro system, after some of the initial software and hardware installation was completed. To do this, I started VMWare Converter in the WinXP installation on the desktop computer. I selected File > New > Import and chose the third of the three available Source options. That is, I designated, as the source, a "Standalone virtual machine, backup or disk image." I browsed to the DI PQI image file on my hard drive but, alas, the only file types that were supported were VMWare Workstation Files (*.vmx, *.vmtn), Microsoft Virtual Server files (*.vmc), Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery Files, and StorageCraft ShadowStor files (*.spf). Virtual Server was a free download, so there was the possibility that it would work with DriveImage PQI files, and I could do a multistep conversion that way. I wasn't able to determine whether Ghost 9.0 or later, or Backup Exec, would import PQI files. So for present purposes, the only way I could create a virtual machine in VMWare Converter was to select the first of the three options, "Physical computer." (The second option allowed importing from "ESX server or VirtualCenter virtual machine.") When I selected the Physical Computer option, I had a choice between a network or local computer. I chose local. It allowed me to select the partitions that I wanted to include. I chose only the two partitions that contained Windows XP software and supporting files. (I kept some things, such as my custom icons and the sets of shortcuts populating my toolbars, in a separate drive D, so that they would not be affected by crashes and restores on drive C. Other things on drive D: the big files, not needing frequent backup, from which I had installed Office 2003 on drive C, and a Saved Settings folder where I kept a backup of my Office settings, Firefox Tab Mix Plus settings, Foxmarks bookmark backup.) Converter labeled my Linux Ext3 partitions as Unknown. Converter gave me several options, for purposes of including drives C and D in my new virtual machine. I could maintain their current size, or I could select Minimum Size (which appeared to be about 10% above the amount of disk space actually being used on those partitions at that time), or I could specify a size, either in GB or in MB. I decided to specify a size in GB, allowing some room to grow from the current size. I appreciated the option to "Ignore page file and hibernation file," each of which could be substantial. When I tried to proceed, I got an error message that didn't seem right: "The selected target size for some volumes is less than the space used on the volumes. The cloning operation may fail if there is not enough space to copy all the files." To my knowledge, the amount of space I had dedicated was more than I was now using, so I decided to go ahead anyway. Next, I got a choice to create either a ESX server or VirtualCenter virtual machine, or a VMware standalone virtual machine. I chose the latter. I designated the new folder where I wanted to put this virtual machine. Next, there was an option to "Allow virtual disk files to grow" or else "Allocate all disk space now for better performance." I chose the former. There was also a suboption, "Split disk into 2GB files," which was checked but greyed out. I guessed that it could be useful when writing to FAT32 drives, which have a limit of somewhere around 4GB, but in this case that didn't apply: the disk was NTFS. Maybe they wanted to make it easier to transfer virtual machines using flash drives. Anyway, I declined the option to customize the identity of the virtual machine. The process of creating the virtual machine commenced. Almost immediately, I got an error message: "Unknown error returned by VMware Converter Agent." I tried again, this time choosing the default amount of disk space for the virtual machine. I was able to do this by right-clicking on the project shown there in the Converter window and making the needed adjustments. I now saw why I had gotten that error message. In response to the instruction to specify the disk size in GB, I had typed 27GB, when instead I should have typed just 27. So now, knowing that I would be letting the disk expand as needed, I typed a size just slightly larger than the minimum. This time, Converter ran. I decided to see whether it would function while I was doing other things on the same machine. It seemed to; however, one of the things I was doing was installing new drivers for an Olympus VN-960PC digital voice recorder. The software for that particular device was not very good. In the past, it had caused other systems to crash. That's what happened this time too. Somewhere in the process, while I was away from the machine, the system crashed and rebooted. My sense was that it probably happened when the system was finished installing the VN-960PC driver, because when I started the VN-960PC software after reboot, it ran successfully, whereas it had not been working before the crash. What I did not know was whether the crash had occurred after Converter finished making a virtual machine. But it appeared that, most likely, Converter had been still in the process, judging by the relatively small sizes of the files in the folder that I had created to hold the virtual machine. So I started and ran Converter again, as before. Sure enough, its list of jobs said that it had finished only 1% of the process. It wouldn't let me overwrite the previous try, so I went to that output folder in Windows Explorer and manually deleted the first try. I did like the job list; its existence suggested that I could run preconfigured jobs repeatedly -- if, for example, I kept wanting to go back and add something else to the physical WinXP installation before making a virtual machine from it. At first, Converter looked like it was really cruising. Based on the amount of time elapsed and the amount it said was remaining, it looked like it would be finished creating a 30GB virtual machine in about an hour. But then the system crashed again. Although I couldn't tell for sure, again the problem appeared to be the Olympus DVR. I made a mental note to see if MSI had upgraded their motherboard drivers, and I rebooted and tried again. This time, I avoided the Olympus software too. The system didn't crash this time. In a total of one hour and 45 minutes (1:45), it produced a set of files occupying a total of 18GB of disk space. So I wasn't sure exactly what was the purpose of asking me to specify some other size. These files included 14 files with a .vmdk extension and one with a .vmx extension. The files all bore the name I had given ("2007-07-17 WinXP Pro"). So the .vmx file was 2007-07-17 WinXP Pro.vmx, and the first of the .vmdk files was 2007-07-17 WinXP Pro.vmdk. All the other .vmdk files had additional verbiage after what I had stated, on this pattern: 2007-07-17 WinXP Pro-s001.vmdk. The *-s001 through *-s013 files were all different sizes. Most were about 2GB. One was about 1.2GB. The smallest, *-s012, was only 320K. I did not have an explanation for this variation. To test the virtual machine, I needed to boot back into Ubuntu. Since I was sure FIXMBR (making it possible to boot WinXP) had once again messed up my Ubuntu Grub bootloader, I booted from the Super Grub Disk and, following instructions, I did the following:

1. boot your SGD floppy disk, USB disk or CD-ROM
2. English Super GRUB Disk
3. Gnu/Linux
4. Fix Boot of Gnu/Linux (GRUB)
5. select your Linux partition
6. see message, 'SGD has succeeded'
7. you're done! reboot

Alas, it wasn't that easy. When I rebooted, I still saw no Grub boot option; the machine went right back into WinXP. But then it wouldn't fully boot Windows either; it crashed and rebooted before completing the startup process, like it had always been doing when Grub was in the way. So I went back to the instructions and explored the next contingency, which the instructions webpage described as follows:

You have more than one hard disk in your computer. You have Windows on one hard disk and you just installed Linux on another. You asked Linux to write GRUB to MBR. When the computer reboots for the first time though, it still only boots into Windows like before. ??? Maybe GRUB has been written to MBR on a non-first hard disk by mistake, where the BIOS won't see it. The BIOS only looks for the MBR on the first hard disk for the bootloader's code. You can check this and verify whether or not this is the problem by booting from the MBR on the non-first hard disk with S.G.D. See the 'Classic Boot' menu, available from the Super GRUB Disk English Super Grub Disk menu.

This meant using the Boot & Tools menu in the Super Grub Disk, and then selecting the Boot Master Boot Record (MBR) option. This gave me a choice of "Hard Disk to Boot." The options were hda, hdb, etc. I really had no idea, other than that it seemed the Super Grub Disk had installed Grub on the same drive as WinXP, and since that was first on the list I logically selected that drive and hit Enter. This booted Windows again, which promptly began its startup process and almost as promptly crashed. I went through the same process again, with Super Grub Disk, but this time I chose the second drive, hdb. That worked. I was now booting in Ubuntu. In Ubuntu, I started VMware Server and selected Open a Virtual Machine. I attempted to browse to the one I had created, but couldn't find it. Then I remembered that I had neglected to move my newly created virtual machine from the NTFS drive on which I had created it, to the FAT32 drive where VMware Server would be able to see it. So I took the opportunity, while I was rebooting back into Windows, to change my bootup so that I could boot into Windows. This would mean using the Super Grub Disk every time I wanted to boot into Ubuntu. That seemed OK, for now, for two reasons. First, I was still working in Windows, upgrading my newly assembled system and so forth, and would probably want to be creating another virtual machine to capture the state of the art (or of *my* art) in WinXP. Second, of course, Windows was a lot more likely to prefer frequent reboots (on my previous machine, I had found it necessary to reboot daily to prevent squirrely behavior). So I rebooted with the WinXP installation CD and ran FIXMBR again, so that I could then go back into Windows and move the virtual machine files to the FAT32 drive (and, having made MSI's recommended change to the BIOS, could update my BIOS as well, using their website instead of the old-fashioned floppy disk approach. Unfortunately, WinXP was still not entirely satisfied. On its first reboot, it crashed again. On the second round, Windows did boot, and I made the changes just mentioned, and then booted into Ubuntu using Super Grub Disk. I went into VMware Server, and this time I was able to open the virtual machine I had made using VMware Converter in WinXP. Server reported that the state of this machine was "Powered Off." I had the options to Start up this guest operating system, Edit virtual machine settings, and enter Notes about this virtual machine. There was also a list of devices, showing Memory of 2304MB, a hard drive, a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive, two Ethernet devices, a USB controller, a sound adapter, a mouse, and two processors (because I was now using the Core 2 Duo CPU). Under the Edit option, I was able to click these various items (e.g., the hard drive) and change some of its features. In the case of Memory, I had the option to "Specify the amount of memory allocated to this virtual machine" from 4MB (although the program indicated that the recommended minimum for this virtual machine, and the amount recommended, were more in the neighborhood of 125-270MB) all the way up to 3,600MB. (The program did not provide a readout giving exact values; I was interpreting what a slider seemed to be saying.) So it did appear, indeed, that the 64-bit hardware and operating system were going to make most of my RAM available to my programs -- though Server also indicated making no more than about 3,450MB available to the virtual machine, because above that level there was the possibility that "Memory swapping may occur beyond this size." Having previously heard that WinXP (32-bit) could access less than about 2.8GB of RAM, I found a conversion calculator webpage and learned that this was equal to 2,867MB. So I told VMware Server to allocate 2,900MB to this virtual machine, leaving about 700MB for the underlying Ubuntu layer (not counting the overhead that had apparently eaten up the rest of the memory between that 3,600MB ceiling and my total of 4,096MB (i.e., 4GB) of installed RAM). Then I clicked on the Start option. Server showed me a black screen with a tabbed interface. This black screen pertained to the 2007-07-17 WinXP Pro tab, which was what I had called my virtual machine. There was also a tab for the opening screen in Server, which had given me options to Create a new virtual machine, Open a virtual machine, Edit host settings, or Switch to a different host. So I could use that tab to open another machine if I wanted; and I verified that I could also continue to open programs (e.g., Text Editor) from the Ubuntu menu at the top of the display. The black screen for the 2007-07-17 WinXP Pro virtual machine gave me a dialog asking if I wanted to change the floppy drive's path from Floppy Drive 0 (which I think is what WinXP called it) to /dev/fd0. Next, I got a warning that "the bridged Ethernet interface is down." When creating the virtual machine, Converter had shown me several options for my Ethernet connections, and had said that I had two such connections. I chose Bridging for one and another option (which I couldn't presently recall) for the other. It now seemed that Bridging was the inferior option. Meanwhile, Windows did begin to load, inside that formerly black screen in VMware Server. I also noticed an indication, on the status bar at the bottom of the screen, that "You do not have VMware Tools installed." WinXP gave me a notification that my hardware seemed to have changed significantly, and that I had three days within which to activate Windows. As I recalled, Microsoft would give you a couple of automatic reactivations for changed hardware, but would then require you to call in and obtain reactivation from a live person. So perhaps there would be some Microsoft-imposed limits on how frequently I would be creating and running new Windows virtual machines. I opted not to reactivate WinXP right now. The virtual bootup continued. Next, Windows told me to insert the CD, or browse to the location, containing WinXP Server Pack 2. It was looking for a folder named i386. I knew that, among the various i386 folders on my machine, this would be the one associated with the WinXP installation files, which resided on my drive D. While I was making notes of these things, the installation continued. I got notices, from the free version of the ZoneAlarm firewall that I had installed in WinXP, indicating that various programs that I had installed in Windows (e.g., Google Desktop, MSN Messenger) were trying to contact the internet. I also received notification that "Your system has no multiple-monitor support." So apparently I would have to enable that in Ubuntu before I could expect WinXP to use it, and presumably the dual monitor limitations of Ubuntu would also become WinXP's limitations. Returning to the location of the My Documents folder, I continued the process of pointing Server toward the E:\Current folder that I had designated, in TweakUI, as the location for My Documents. But Server did not see E: because, of course, E: was an NTFS partition. If I wanted the virtual machine to point to a partition used in WinXP, it seemed I would have to make sure it was a FAT32 partition. Alternately, in this case, I could relocate E:\Current to the one FAT32 partition that I did have on my system, or I could just tell Server to use some other folder, somewhere, for My Documents. But now I realized that this was not a correct analysis because the dialog box (right-click > Properties on the My Documents folder) was *not* showing the FAT32 drive. The drives it was showing were those that I had designated as part of the virtual machine when I created it in Converter. If I wanted to use E: for My Documents, or if I wanted to use F:\Cache for Internet Explorer's Temporary Internet Files folder, I would have to include those E: and F: partitions in the virtual machine. Apparently the fact that C and D were NTFS was irrelevant; Converter had already taken care of that. But now ... if I saved files in a folder on the virtual C or D, where would they be when I shut down Server? That question remained to be answered. For now, I designated a new TEMP folder on D as My Documents. WinXP continued giving me installation-style dialog boxes. Now I had the Found New Hardware Wizard, telling me that it was ready to help me install software for my Video Controller (VGA Compatible). I had not been getting that dialog in WinXP, where my video controller was already installed. Apparently what was happening, at this stage in the process, was that a complete Windows installation was adapting itself to what it considered new hardware, just as if I had taken a drive image from e.g., Norton Ghost or Drive Image 2002 and had installed it onto a new computer. I wondered if I would have to go through these same steps for each new computer where I installed the virtual machine, or if one pass would acquaint the virtual machine with itself so that it could then be transferred to other machines without difficulty. I tried the automatic installation option in the Found New Hardware wizard. After trying, it said, "Cannot Install This Hardware." So I clicked Back and tried again, this time using the EVGA driver CD that had come with my video card. I had not correctly attached the hard drive LED cable to my new motherboard, so I appreciated that Server was flashing red on a hard drive icon on its status bar, indicating that hard drive reads or writes were occurring. But the outcome was the same: "Cannot Install This Hardware." I recalled that I might have a more recent version of the driver on E, but since E was not part of the virtual machine and was NTFS, I couldn't move things around to make that update available right now. Now the system wanted to install the PCI Bus Master IDE Controller. This was mildly discouraging. If we were having to install the IDE controller, then I realized I had better settle in for what could be a long introductory setup process for this new virtual machine, with lots of the requisite, retarded WinXP requests to be reminded of where the i386 folder was, and with multiple reboots to complete the installation of the various pieces of hardware. At the first such reboot, I hustled to get the EVGA CD out of my CD drive, and reinsert the Super Grub Disk, before realizing that this would be only a virtual reboot. Rebooting the virtual machine took longer than in WinXP. Certainly the cursor was moving a lot more slowly. The cursor was trapped inside the virtual machine tab, but Server's status bar told me I could release it with Ctrl-Alt. I tried that and was now able to click on the options on Server's menu bar (File, Edit, View, Host, VM, Tabs, Help) and also on the buttons on its toolbar (Shut Down, Suspend, Start Up (greyed out), Restart Guest, Snapshot, Revert (greyed out), Full Screen, Quick Switch, Summary, Console). The View menu pick gave me a Full Screen option too, and I chose that. Now I had an unimpeded, full-screen view of what looked like a Windows bootup, complete with yet another reactivation dialog. And yes, inside this virtual machine, the cursor definitely was clunky. What I got, on reboot, was my Windows XP desktop, but at a resolution more like that which you would get in Safe Mode. I got a Low Disk Space warning for Drive D. To fix that, I tried to switch out of Full Screen mode, using the recommended Ctrl-Alt-Return key combination. That didn't work. Help! I was trapped in XP, and while I was screwing around with Ctrl-Alt-Return (or maybe because of that) it had rebooted its virtual self and was trying again to complete the virtual boot process. So I went through the various dialogs again. There were some problems: a WinXP notice indicating that some unspecified hardware (probably the display) had not installed properly, and a note that I had limited or no connectivity on my local network connection. The nVidia software seemed to be installed -- I could use it to try to adjust screen resolution -- but, as noted above, the driver was not. So I was limited in what I could do with the display. I was able to adjust the resolution to 1024x768, but not to 1280x1024. Trying the latter (which I was able to do in Control Panel, but which was not even an option in the nVidia software) gave me an Ubuntu error message and (finally) popped me out of full-screen mode back to the default Server mode. The error message said, "Unable to find an appropriate host video mode. Adding the guest mode to the 'display' subsection of the 'screen' section of your /etc/X11/XF86Config and restarting X is likely to help." For a minute there, I thought I might be locked in the same reboot cycle that I had experienced in WinXP, after I had installed Ubuntu and before I had used FIXMBR to make Windows happy with the bootloading process. I feared I might have to run FIXMBR inside this virtual machine somehow -- though I didn't see how, because this virtual machine did not give me the BIOS options that appeared when I would first power up the machine. It didn't seem that I could boot the WinXP installation CD and run FIXMBR from the Windows Recovery Console, all inside this virtual machine. Fortunately, it now appeared that this concern was unnecessary, because after a reboot or two, the system did settle down, and I could proceed to play within the virtual machine, starting with the display adjustments just mentioned. I didn't actually drop out of Server and try to figure out how to follow the X-related instructions just quoted, though. Instead, I focused on basic functionality. Could I use Server to run Word and other programs I would use frequently? I started with the mouse: could I make it run better? In Control Panel, I wasn't allowed to increase its speed from the lowest possible setting, and I got "Pointing device on Unknown Port" when I went into the mouse Devices tab. It seemed we had the wrong driver. But I'd had the right driver in WinXP; evidently Server was unable to make it work correctly inside Ubuntu. I wasn't sure if this was a problem with Server or just a matter of upgrading my mouse driver in Ubuntu, though I hadn't noticed any mouse problems in Ubuntu outside of this Server situation. I suspected that I might be getting the Low Disk Space error for D because, in the absence of my other hard drives, virtual WinXP had relocated my page file to D. But no: System Properties in Control Panel reported no page file on either C or D. But then, when I navigated to the root of D in Windows Explorer, I saw that there was indeed a pagefile. For performance purposes, it seemed that my next virtual machine should contain an additional partition, located on a physically distinct hard drive, so I could park the page file there -- though I wasn't quite sure if that would work as planned. Anyway, to make more space on D, I used the kludge approach of getting out of Server's full-screen mode by trying to set my resolution higher than 1024x768 in Control Panel; and now that I had access to Server's controls again, I went looking for a way to increase the space allowed to drive D. Interestingly, in the Host Settings option, I found an option to "Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM." I wondered if this would improve performance, so I tried it. But I got an error indicating that I didn't have permission to do that. So I was stuck with the default, "Allow some virtual machine memory to be swapped." I didn't see any way to increase the space available for D right now, so I went back into fullscreen mode to experiment with programs. Word started up just fine. It wasn't able to see any of my documents on E, so I tried creating a new one. Copying the same chunks of text over and over, I created a document that filled 1,429 pages, and then I ran a find-and-replace. Word did not die, though it did prove unable to number more than 32,768 footnotes (which I assumed was a limitation of Word, not of VMware). I also opened an Excel spreadsheet of 1,000 rows by 50 columns, each cell but one containing a formula. Word was a bit sluggish in this setup, but Excel seemed to do its calculations almost instantly. I was also able to open Access, Acrobat 8, IrfanView, AvaFind, and Cool Edit 2000. Opening times were slow. Acrobat, like WinXP, would give me only a few days of use before I had to reactivate. Internet Explorer would not open; instead, when I tried, I got Firefox. I was able to see my Hotmail account in Firefox; but when I tried reading a message, I got "The proxy server is refusing connections"; likewise, I was able to see the Google search page (my default), but I got that same message trying to do a search. So there was going to be some additional work to get my online connection functioning. I loaded Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Premiere Elements, and Windows Movie Maker while still having the foregoing programs loaded. These last three were slow-loaders anyway, and they sure weren't setting any speed records now. I wanted to use MovieMaker to download some video from my camcorder, but I got an indication that "the required audio hardware cannot be found on your computer." Premiere Elements gave me a similar error message. I hadn't yet tried to access the video camera from within WinXP either, so I thought that might be a Windows issue rather than a VMware or Ubuntu issue. But I definitely had used the audio in Windows, so now I tried playing a WAV file. But IrfanView, which was my default WAV player, said "All wave devices that can play files in the current format are in use." I tried another WAV; same thing. No luck with an MP3 either, though no error message. I tried loading the Olympus Digital Wave Player program that had caused my real Windows XP installation to crash. I got an audio output device error there too. So I had to conclude that, even though virtual WinXP had not asked for an audio driver (as it had asked for a video driver) when it was familiarizing itself with its little world there inside VMware Server, it did in fact need one. I wasn't sure which of the foregoing problems were Server-specific and which were attributable more generally to Ubuntu. Possibly using Wine or some (other) emulator in conjunction with a determined effort to find drivers, tweak RAM, and so forth, would yield a significant performance improvement and would enable me to run most, if not all, of these programs. I had realized, for example, that there was a recent development by which Ubuntu could access NTFS drives. Having done enough of a preliminary test, I clicked Start > Shut Down; and after some delay, the machine rebooted into Windows. It was time to reach some conclusions. Conclusions In 1999, I tried my hand at Debian Linux, and reported the results on Freshmeat.net (which sent me two T-shirts for my trouble). The articles I wrote were entitled "Installation Tale of a Debian Newbie," "The Linux Newbie Installs Corel," and "The Linux Newbie Replies: WFM?" Rounding out the series, in January 2000, I wrote a piece entitled, "Is Linux for Crazies?" That last one, republished on this blog, offered this prediction for the progress of Linux:

Mainstreamers, I guarantee, will run like hell if you make them listen to Mao-versus-Trotsky debates between the devotees of Debian and the comrades of Caldera. In the first stage of operating system socialism, I know, there must be competition among corporate bodies, with each subscribing to the same overall philosophy and yet each seeking to twist the nascent state to its advantage. In the second stage, however, the Stalins will take over from the Lenins -- that is, the theoreticians will give way to thoroughgoing non-purists who will compromise with the Devil if that's what it takes to succeed.

Was that correct? To my knowledge, the answer, as for most predictions, is Partly. It seems to me that Ubuntu is succeeding partly because Canonical is motivated along the lines just suggested (with no negative implications intended regarding the Stalin illustration), in terms that do (and perhaps inevitably must) provoke objections from purists. I am more optimistic about Linux than I was in 2000, and I was pretty optimistic then. I felt it would take some time. I wouldn't have thought it would take seven years to reach the present point. Seven years seems like a long time -- although, in retrospect, I would have to do a little bit of recalling and digging to explain what significant changes occurred in another seven-year period, such as the one from 1987 to 1994. Some years from now, it will probably just seem like Linux went through a transitional period, here in the 2007 timeframe -- that it was transitioning from being a tool of hobbyists to being mainstream, but that of course it did make that transition and now (circa 2012, perhaps) the dominance of Linux may seem entirely natural. In the meantime, it seems to me that each version of Ubuntu is incorporating significant improvements over the preceding ones, for end-user purposes. My take on the experience described in this post is that Ubuntu still has, for me, some important limitations. Not tons of them, not like in 2000. I don't feel, now, that I have to learn programming in order to use Linux; we are much closer to the point at which the command line becomes a useful tool, as in DOS under Windows, without being an absolute necessity. At this writing, it seemed, I still needed to run Windows on an essentially standalone basis. I would retain the Ubuntu partitions I had installed, and could get to them with the Super Grub Disk; but ordinarily my machine would boot straight into Windows, and I would do my work there. In view of Ubuntu's rapid recent progress, and Canonical's rollout of new versions every six months, and considering how much other work I had to do, it seemed prudent, for me, to let the operating system issue rest for now, and to wait and see what further developments might come along in the next one or two releases of Ubuntu. At a certain point, too, I might find that I could afford a processor upgrade, or might have learned more about hardware limitations that had caused VMware to perform sluggishly. I did have the impression that VMware was determined to succeed, and I hoped that adjustments -- on their end, or on mine -- might make all the difference in the not-too-distant future.

Ubuntu/WinXP Pro Dual Boot Partitioning

I was trying to set up a dual-boot system, with both Windows XP Professional (32-bit, not x64) and Ubuntu Linux on the first hard drive. The partitioning process was not working out smoothly. Ultimately, it became a dual-boot system on two separate drives, for reasons described below. ********************************************* I started with a 76GB hard drive. Using PartitionMagic, I divided it as follows: PROGRAMS -- the 28GB WinXP program installation partition LINUX -- the 10GB partition where I intended to install Ubuntu (Ext3 format) SWAPSPACE -- a 2GB swap partition for Linux Those three were all primary partitions. Then I had an extended partition, containing this logical partition: STATIC -- a 36GB space where I stored files that I did not want to back up or restore each time I reinstalled Windows. Example: the WinXP installation files. On this drive, I also stored copies of the programs I installed, in separate folders corresponding to the dates of my various Drive Image backups of the PROGRAMS drive. That way, if I if I restored an earlier Drive Image PQI file to replace a corrupted installation on the PROGRAMS drive, I would know which additional programs I had installed since then, so I could quickly bring the PROGRAMS partition back up to current status. I started with an introductory Ubuntu installation. Then I focused on installing WinXP into PROGRAMS and STATIC. Unfortunately, when this was done, I found (as apparently others have found) that Microsoft's Windows installation had mysteriously corrupted the Ubuntu installation. I needed to start over. This is where the current, more complex partitioning problems began to emerge. I booted the Ubuntu live CD and tried to proceed with the installation. It went partway, but it balked when we reached the point of partitioning the drive. I believe the error message indicated that the "/" partition (i.e., the root) was not formatted. I bailed out and used Ubuntu's GParted program to try to partition and format as needed. I kept getting an error message (when I went down into the details of the failure to format) indicating that the program "will not make a filesystem here." Back in PartitionMagic, I wiped out the Linux partitions and tried to create new ones. Research had now indicated that I would probably want more than just the two Linux partitions mentioned above. But PartitionMagic wouldn't let me raid the STATIC drive (which really needed only a fraction of its size) for disk space that I could use for additional Linux partitions. Upon checking for errors, I discovered that PartitionMagic reported that both the PROGRAMS and STATIC (i.e., the Windows) drives had been improperly dismounted. I didn't believe that problem had been there at the start of this effort. I wondered if WinXP was designed in such a way as to leave Windows partitions improperly dismounted whenever GParted tried to work on that drive. Or possibly I was mistaken: maybe an improper dismount had happened in some other way, sometime since my last check on the previous day. To get rid of the improper dismount problem, I could have moved everything off of drives C and D (i.e., the PROGRAMS and STATIC partitions) and used PM to wipe out those partitions and start over. Seeking an easier route, I tried booting with the WinXP CD and using the Recovery Console's FIXMBR command (followed by CHKDSK /R on drive C but not on D, repeated until there were no more reports of errors being corrected). Back in PM, it appeared that CHKDSK /R was not necessary: there were now no errors on either C or D. (In any case, it would also have been possible to run CHKDSK via Computer Management from within WinXP, though it would not actually have run until after rebooting.) I rebooted the Ubuntu live CD and started the Install process again. This time, it froze at 12% of the way through the Scanning Disks dialog. I hit the Reset button on the computer and booted PM. It showed improper dismount errors again. I ran FIXMBR from the WinXP CD and then rebooted from the Ubuntu live CD. I got back to the Prepare Partitions dialog. This time around, the advice seemed to be that I should actually have these partitions with these sizes: / -- Root, for booting -- 500MB /usr -- holds Linux program files -- 6GB /home -- holds settings that you want to preserve when you update the program files -- 500MB /var -- so that if e-mail fills up, the functioning of the system won't be affected -- 3GB /tmp -- temporary space, potentially including DVD images -- 5GB /swap -- holds material in active use that won't fit in RAM -- 2GB FAT32 -- both WinXP and Linux can read and write to FAT32 drives, so keep currently worked-on data here -- remainder of drive (all being Ext3 except the FAT32 drive and /swap). They kept saying that /swap should be 1.5 to 2 times the size of RAM, but I had just moved up to 4 GB of RAM, and while researching a RAM drive I had heard that people rarely maxed out /swap partitions of even 1GB, and I found one source that said 1GB is enough if you have 1GB or more of RAM. Just to be safe, I decided to make /swap a 2GB partition. I couldn't tell what to enter (in the Edit Partition dialog within Ubuntu's Prepare Partitions dialog) for the mount point for the FAT32 drive. It looked like I was supposed to just enter a slash followed by whatever name I wanted. I thought there might be an eight-character limit. So I designated a mount point called /2way. (Apparently they were still working on the tools to make NTFS drives as accessible as FAT32 drives within Linux.) The rest of installation went on while I took a nap. When I got back, I shut down the system, plugged in my other hard drives (which I had unplugged, so they wouldn't get screwed up by all this rebooting and shutting down), and rebooted. The Grub boot loader came on, as expected, and I chose Windows. Windows did not complete loading. It got partway through and rebooted. This had happened previously. At first, I had been thinking that this indicated a problem with my new motherboard, new RAM, or new CPU in the system. But then I observed that, when everything was cleaned up, Windows booted just fine. So now I suspected a problem in one of the hard drives. On reboot, Windows loaded to a point of showing me a dialog with an option to reboot to complete installation of my "new" hard drive. I accepted, and booted into PM. I ran PM's "Check for Errors" on each partition. It reported Error 1513, "Bad attribute position in file record" for one drive. Worse, it reported "Partition table error #114 found" on the primary boot drive that I had just configured. I rebooted with the Windows XP installation CD, selected Recovery Console, and ran CHKDSK /R on the Error 1513 drive. CHKDSK actually froze: I ran it overnight, and came back in the morning to see that it was still stuck at 66%. I rebooted and ran it a couple more times. Having satisfactorily corrupted or lost whatever irreplaceable files it was gagging on previously, it was now satisfied, and proceeded to run relatively quickly. (Note to self: next time, disconnect the uninvolved drives BEFORE doing lots of partitioning and crashing and system resetting.) It then developed that, while CHKDSK /R may have fixed some problems on that drive, it had nothing to do with Error 1513. Running PM again showed that the error was still there. I belatedly consulted the relevant Symantec webpage and found that Error 1513 arises from a bug in PM, remediable by a patch. So I downloaded the patch on this other computer and made a note to myself to fiddle with that later. Meanwhile, I rebooted and let the machine default into an Ubuntu boot. It seemed to freeze. I rebooted again and this time chose the alternate Ubuntu boot, which I construed as being something like Windows' Safe Mode boot (F8, after booting). It ran through a bunch of command line messages and then gave me a prompt. Since I didn't remember anything about shell commands anymore, I hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and rebooted again. This time I went back to the default Ubuntu boot, though by hitting Enter rather than waiting 10 seconds (or whatever) for it to boot on its own. This time, the system booted. It showed me a popup telling me that there were downloadable updates. So I downloaded those. Incidentally, this was a lot easier than Microsoft's separate update pages for Windows and for Office, each of which required multiple clicks and long delays while Microsoft figured out if I had the right software to do the downloads. Unfortunately, the system froze before it completed the downloads. I suspected this stemmed from a hard drive problem. I rebooted -- this time, into Windows -- with the intention of doing the PartitionMagic update. Windows did install OK. But then it froze. Hard drive problem, I was sure. I booted back into Ubuntu. It froze too! I tried again. This time it worked. I tried doing the last of the Ubuntu downloads, but I got this: An error occurred The following details are provided: E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem. E: _cache->open{} failed, please report. I wasn't sure to whom I should report it, or how to manually run dpkg, so I just bailed out of that dialog. I decided to see if I could find an Ubuntu counterpart to PM. I looked around on the menus for GParted or TestDisk or anything that looked like a partition manager, but I couldn't find them. I did a search for GParted, and found a file called gparted.desktop in a folder called /usr/share/app-install/desktop, but when I double-clicked on it, it just opened what appeared to be the source code for that program (in a dialog box whose X box was in the top center rather than in the expected upper-right corner). A search for TestDisk turned up nothing. I rebooted with my GParted CD. Meanwhile, on the laptop computer on which I was typing this post, I found that the Ubuntu documentation pages (with which I was only at that point starting to become familiar) carried a page about PM error 114. That page suggested that GParted would not deal with the problem. I couldn't tell, because once again GParted put me at a prompt preceded by no instructions but a screenful of executed commands; I typed Exit and hit Enter (something funny about that); now I found myself at what appeared to be GParted instructions; they said things that just made me feel bad (e.g., "VESA driver should always work" and "The graphical environment configuration should have been done automatically. Unfortunately it did not, since you are back to the bash!"); so I hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and rebooted with the Windows XP installation CD. That Ubuntu documentation page also said that the problem arose from having your partitions out of order. They didn't seem too sure of it; it was phrased as more like an idea or a possibility. Apparently I needed to have my primary partitions come in order, 1 through 4, followed by my logical partitions. I wasn't sure how to determine whether they were in order or not. They said the WinXP CD or an "ancient FDISK" could delete the misnumbered partition. I wasn't too keen to use FDISK, which as I recalled would be eager to delete everything in sight, and I couldn't see that the WinXP CD had any commands up to the task, at least not in Recovery Console. I rebooted to WinXP and prepared to run the PM update to version 8.1. I would have done it on the laptop instead, where I had downloaded it, but for some reason now, of all times, was when my laptop decided to change my WinXP password. So I couldn't get in, and was compelled to do my Windows work on the desktop instead. There, when I double-clicked on the PM upgrade on my flash drive, a failed reboot persuaded me to use Safe Mode instead. But in Safe Mode, I got InstallShield Error 1152: Error extracting to the temporary location. So I tried that on (would you believe) a friend's computer, but I got the same error message there, even after running it from the hard drive rather than the jump drive. My speculation was that the update might only work on an installed version, whereas I always ran PM from the bootable CD. While I was there in Safe Mode, I recalled thinking that maybe the person who wrote the Ubuntu page meant using the Disk Management portion of Computer Management, inside of XP, and not the WinXP installation CD. But I couldn't figure out how to make sense of that. If they were talking about drives, then, yes, my disks were all out of order. I booted from a SATA drive, which was listed after the IDE drives, so it was and would remain in a position other than number 1. If they were talking about partitions on the drive, as I assumed, I didn't see how Computer Management could help. It's not like you can drag and drop partitions there. Nor were they numbered. Indeed, the Ubuntu partitions weren't even lettered. So Computer Management looked useless for this. Some posters said PartitionMagic is bad for Linux partitions, so I decided to postpone the PM update project. Instead, I looked around for another Ubuntu-friendly partition manager, one with a graphical user interface (GUI). Somebody recommended "QTpart" on the Knoppix CD. I had one of those for a year or more, but never got around to using it much, and had evidently tossed it. Now I downloaded and burned it again, on the laptop in Ubuntu. (Later, it developed that, according to Kevin Farnham, it might have been more to my advantage to get QTParted on the System Rescue CD -- although, at latest word, it appeared that QTParted might no longer be on that CD.) I booted and ran the Knoppix CD. I found what I was looking for right away: K Menu > System > QTParted. Nice user interface. Drives numbered, like that Ubuntu person had been describing. But the numbers didn't seem to be out of order. I couldn't see a solution here. Kevin Farnham was advising to create just a few Linux partitions, not all of the ones I created. Reducing the number of partitions would reduce the number of problems that partitions could cause, right? So that was one possibility. Another possibility was to use one drive for Windows and one for Ubuntu. I liked this possibility. Among other things, it would mean that I could continue to use PartitionMagic, if I wanted, for the Windows drives. I really had found it to be a very useful and reliable tool over the years, and was not too eager to entrust my data to something unknown. Either way, it seemed I would have to wipe out my Linux partitions and start over with the Ubuntu installation. That was OK; I didn't have much invested in them yet. So I shut down the system, unplugged all the other drives, rebooted with the Knoppix CD, and used QTParted to wipe out one of the Linux partitions on that drive. I could only wipe out one of those Linux partitions. That's all QTParted would do. After that, the Delete menu pick was greyed out. I tried killing QTParted and starting it again; no joy. I rebooted the Knoppix CD and started QTParted again. This time, it let me delete all the remaining Linux partitions. Now I had to move my Windows installation to another drive, so as to free up this drive for Ubuntu (and the accompanying FAT32 workspace) entirely. This involved some drive imaging (so as to move the WinXP partition without having to reinstall Windows), moving quantities of files to make space on another drive, etc. Before doing that, though, I needed to start PartitionMagic and verify that it was now happy with this newly eviscerated boot drive (and with all the others that I had been shutting down improperly through various freezes and forced reboots). So I plugged in all the drives and booted from the PM CD. It developed that I still had PM Error 114 on the boot drive, so I rebooted with the WinXP CD and ran FIXMBR again. Unfortunately, that made no difference; Error 114 was still there. So I intended to go back to the WinXP Recovery Console again, but fumbled and wound up booting XP from the hard drive. This was amusing: PartitionMagic was truly unhappy with my drive, but XP would boot from it. I figured it would freeze up again soon enough, though. So while I was here, I went ahead and moved files and so forth, for purposes of freeing up the formerly dual-booting drive to be entirely devoted to Ubuntu. While I was killing time, waiting for CHKDSK /R to run yet again on one drive that got screwed up, I was looking at websites. I noticed that the Ubuntu documentation includes a thing by Confused57 from last year; but for me it seemed only somewhat helpful because it looks like Ubuntu has come a long way since then. By the time I had finished moving files and rearranging folders with PartitionMagic and Drive Image and CHKDSK and FIXMBR and so forth, I had made a new discovery, browsing away here on the laptop. It seemed that I should have done an MD5SUM comparison, to insure that my Ubuntu CD contained a perfect copy of the files that I was supposed to have received. To do this, I put the CD into the drive on this laptop ... but that wasn't right. I was supposed to check the ISO, not the CD that resulted from it. Well, by this time I had deleted the ISO, so this would mean downloading and checking a new ISO and burning a new CD. It seemed to me that errors could also creep in during the CD-burning process or the installation process. I appreciated that it made sense to eliminate errors wherever possible. But I had already installed this CD and it had seemed to work. I hadn't gone to this trouble for other software I had downloaded in the past. So I decided to skip it, at least for now. But then I decided to do it anyway. The Ubuntu documentation on the matter wasn't clear, so it seemed that I should edit it. Nice thing about having your documentation in a wiki -- you can actually do that. The general idea, as I understood it, was that you download the ISO, using Windows or Linux or whatever; you save it in a folder; you fire up Ubuntu from a bootable Ubuntu CD (such as the one that I had burned before I knew about this ISO checking process); you go to the folder where your downloaded ISO is; you run the MD5SUM program; it spits out a long string of numbers and letters; and you compare that string (which results from your ISO) against a pre-supplied string. If the two don't match, your ISO is flawed. If they match, you proceed to burn the CD using the ISO (and, in my case, you toss the unchecked, first-round CD). Or at least that's what I thought was supposed to happen. But my Ubuntu CD didn't seem to have the MD5SUM utility that the Ubuntu documentation said could be found in most distributions. I used the Search for Files tool, but it didn't find anything with MD5SUM in its name. Taking a different approach, I tried to figure out how to get to an Ubuntu command line -- for the first time -- since the Ubuntu directions said to enter a command on the command line. From the menu at the top of the Ubuntu desktop, the path I took was Applications > Accessories > Terminal. That gave me a prompt in the shell -- resembling DOS or a Windows command-line box, except it was white instead of black. I didn't know how to change from the Ubuntu drive, which the prompt was now showing me, to the DATA partition on my hard drive, which is where I had stashed the ISO file. I went into help and typed Terminal. That led me to the GNOME Terminal Manual. But that seemed to be oriented toward how to change the appearance of the Terminal. I guessed that I needed a shell manual. But I didn't know which kind of shell I had. Several years earlier, I had worked briefly in BASH, but I knew there were others. I searched in the Ubuntu community documentation for "shell," and found three entries. The first, regarding CShell, began with instructions on how to install it, so I guessed this was not what was already installed on the Ubuntu CD. The second, Shell, seemed much closer to the action. (If you go at it the other way, starting with the main documentation page, you find Command Line listed as an Advanced Topic, which seemed correct and yet odd, for something that I was trying to do before even installing the system.) The community documentation page gave me a basic introduction to using the command line and then led on to Using the Terminal. But by now I had noticed that these community pages weren't specific to version 7.04, so I opted to go instead with the command line advanced topics page, specific to 7.04, that I had just uncovered in the course of researching this paragraph. That advanced topics page led to a list of Basic Commands, which also seemed odd, though again I felt that I understood the concept: you are now doing basic work within the advanced task of using the command line, which is a basic part of the advanced task of installing Ubuntu. (It seemed like I should revise the list of links at the bottom of the community wiki page, to point to this list of basic commands; but then I thought maybe there was a reason why nobody had done so already. Being a newcomer, I thought I better hadn't. The list of basic commands took me to a list of file and directory commands. From these, I learned that I could use CD ~/ to take me to another drive on the machine. So I typed CD ~/DATA (where, in DOS, I would have typed E:, to take me to E: (DATA). It said "No such file or directory." Then I realized I had it wrong: that would take me to a DATA folder within my "/" (i.e., root) directory. I still wasn't sure how to get to root or, in this case, DATA. I typed HELP at the shell prompt, and it gave me a list of commands. I realized I didn't exactly know how to use them, so I wondered if I could type the command and then /? (e.g., CD /?) to show me some instructions. That didn't work. The Linux version, it turns out, is COMMAND -h or COMMAND --help, and if you want more info, it's MAN COMMAND (short for "show me the manual for this command"). Since I didn't know which command I wanted, I typed MAN MAN. But as you'd expect, that was the manual about manuals, which was too much in the other direction. I tried CD -h, but Terminal said "invalid option." MAN CD didn't work either. I tried doing some Google searches, and this led to the concept that, in Linux, a drive or partition might sometimes be called a "filesystem." Someone also reminded me that Linux refers to drives as HDA, HDB, etc., not DATA. But when I tried CD /DEV/HDA, it said, "Not a directory." I hadn't seen anyone offering the example of CD ~/HDA, so I didn't think that was quite the answer I was seeking. It seemed just bizarre that all these lists of basic commands didn't say anything about how to move yourself to another drive. From my DOS days, I thought maybe I could tinker with the prompt, so that it would show me where I was (if not where I was going); but MAN PROMPT turned up nothing. I found a cool Mandriva user's manual. It brought me to understand that the purpose of the tilde (~) was to put me in someone else's home directory (e.g., CD ~JOE). But even this cool manual didn't tell me how to run a program on some drive other than the one I was already on. So I gave up (again) on trying to figure out how to do the MD5SUM thing on the downloaded Ubuntu ISO. So I was free to go ahead and install Ubuntu again. Now that I had gotten rid of those pesky Windows partitions, I really had room to roam on this disk. I bumped up the numbers from the list, above, and I also changed my order to match the Mount Point options provided in the installer's Edit Partition dialog, as follows: / -- Root -- 500MB /boot -- 2GB /home -- 10GB /tmp -- 8GB /usr -- 10GB /var -- 5GB swap -- 4GB FAT32 -- remainder of drive (36GB) This list reflects some corrections made subsuquently -- notably the addition of a /boot partition. Unfortunately, I got only as far as /var, and then the Ubuntu Prepare Partitions screen said "unusable." It seems I was setting up primary partitions, and only four were allowed. I had thought that was just a Windows limitation. So now I figured I had to find out how to set up extended partitions. A search for "extended" or "logical partition" turned up nothing in the Ubuntu 7.04 or community documentation pages. Plan B: I used PartitionMagic to set up a 21GB unformatted primary partition and a 55GB logical (extended) partition, also unformatted. Then I rebooted and restarted the Ubuntu installation. Once I was back in Ubuntuland, however, the Scanning Drives dialog (after I selected "manual") froze at 50%. Apparently this thing between it and PM was mutual. I powered off the machine and belatedly unplugged my other drives, which by now were probably corrupted from the unorthodox shutdown. I rebooted into the installer and tried again. It was willing to convert the primary partition into a 21GB root ("/"), but it wouldn't subdivide it. I realized I probably should have been using QTParted instead of PM, so I rebooted with the Knoppix CD and tried setting up my seven partitions that way, putting the first three in primary partitions and the rest in the extended partition. The labels I specified in QTParted did not survive into the Ubuntu installer. I had to type /var, /home, etc. again. Otherwise, though, this seemed to work: the installer recognized all of my partitions' sizes; I just had to add the labels in a manual (not guided) install, specify the mount points (e.g., /var, not /media/sda8), and make sure it was specifying the right size (the size I had already created) for each partition, instead of repeating the size of the preceding one. About this time, I noticed that the installer specified that I needed to specify a root system of at least 2GB. Since I didn't feel like undoing all my hard work with QTParted and so forth, and since other people had talked about needing root partitions of only 500MB or less, I thought I would just go with the setup described above, for now, and see what happened. The installer didn't edit my setup, telling me that e.g., my smaller root was inadequate, so I figured they just meant that you need a root of at least 2GB if you're not going to have all these other partitions. Going on to the next step was a disappointment, however, in another sense: now that I had disconnected my other drives to keep them from being damaged by all this screwing around, there were no other (i.e., WinXP) accounts for Ubuntu to import. This would not do. I surely wanted it to import as much as possible, saving me the work of entering lots of trivial settings. So I bailed out of the installer, shut down the machine, connected the WinXP programs drive, and re-entered the partition data, above. Needless to say, I wished they'd had a way to save my installation data thus far on a floppy or jump drive, or perhaps load my WinXP settings onto a floppy or jump drive from inside Windows, before starting the Ubuntu install. On the rebound, I took care to do surgery only on the partitions on the Linux drive. I also clicked the Format? box, which I construed as a question of whether I wanted to format these new drives. I wasn't sure, but I thought I probably did. (It wouldn't let me check Format? for the /swap and FAT32 drives.) While waiting for the thing to install, I was having some second thoughts about the size of my root. One guy said it should be at least 3GB, because it held the entire operating system -- but, you know, I eventually did get the "Installation is complete" dialog. At that point, I clicked on the button to restart. The system restarted and gave me the menu. I chose Windows, just to see if it would still load OK. It did. (It crashed before completely loading, probably because of one or more imperfect system shutdowns recently.) I rebooted and this time chose Ubuntu. It loaded too. I wondered whether PartitionMagic would still report error 114 for the Linux drive. So after I was finished downloading a boatload of updates into Ubuntu, I rebooted with the PM CD. Or at least I tried. It seemed that the Ubuntu installation had removed my ability to boot from the CD. I had always done so by specifying, in my BIOS, that the CD should be the first in the series of boot devices. But now the system froze shortly after starting to load the PartitionMagic CD. I tried again with the F11 option, pressed shortly after rebooting (my previous motherboard had not offered this option), but that made no difference. I tried booting with the WinXP installation CD, and it loaded and ran Recovery Console without a problem. (While I was there, I ran FIXMBR to apply, once again, the requisite fix to the problem that arose each time WinXP would shut down on this new motherboard.) I tried using a backup of the PartitionMagic CD, but it too, froze. I tried booting my CD for PM's sister program, Drive Image. It booted using the same Caldera DR-DOS as PM; it froze too. I could see that this new Ubuntu installation was going to force some changes in my customary way of doing things on the computer, since I was in the habit of using these DriveImage and PM CDs pretty often. I tried booting the Knoppix CD; no problem. I rebooted and let the system load itself as it would. Apparently FIXMBR had screwed up my Ubuntu installation, because the Grub loader did not come up; instead, we went immediately into WinXP. It rebooted itself once. Second time, it said it had found new disks and needed to reboot. Third time, it seemed stable. I fired up Drive Image from within XP. It said it "has detected an error 116 on the partition starting at sector 44034165 on disk 4." It further said, "The starting LBA value is 44034165 and the CHS value is 16450559. The CHS values must be equal." It offered to correct the problem. Disk 4, I believed, was WinXP's term for the Ubuntu drive. I couldn't tell for sure: at this point XP's Disk Management showed no drives other than the CD drive. Since Ubuntu wasn't booting anyway, I said sure, why not. But DriveImage wasn't done. It found a total of five such errors, and fixed each upon my approval. Then it ran, and I confirmed that Drive Image did count the Ubuntu drive as Disk 4. PartitionMagic, running within XP, would not provide data on the Linux partitions; unlike the version booted from CD, this version gave me an Error 510, "The version of the file system is not supported." It wouldn't check the Windows drives for errors because they had open files, so I rebooted into Safe Mode and ran the checks there. The patch (mentioned above) worked: there were no 1513 errors. But even in Safe Mode, PM wouldn't check the program drive or the drives containing pagefiles for errors. I thought FIXMBR was probably the reason why the Ubuntu (Grub) boot screen was no longer showing up on reboot. But I wondered if maybe Drive Image's little cleanup job might have fixed whatever the problem was. On reboot, I had the answer: nope. Still no Grub. When I looked into it, I found that, sure enough, according to AndyFair, FIXMBR removes Grub. Budman7 said, more specifically, that FIXMBR replaces the Grub loader with a Windows bootloader. Acting on advice from rcgreen, I rebooted with the Ubuntu CD, to see if it would recognize the Ubuntu partitions on the hard drive. (I noticed, this time, that on bootup the CD offers an option of checking the CD for errors, so I did that instead of going any further now with the MD5SUM process. The disc passed the test with no problems.) It did recognize them. Now I found a page in the Ubuntu community docs on recovering Ubuntu after installing Windows. This approach claimed to put Grub into the root partition, not the MBR. In that case, I hoped that future uses or abuses of FIXMBR would cause no further problems to Ubuntu. I followed the instructions there (basically, boot the Ubuntu CD; open a Terminal window; type "sudo -i" (without the quotes) ; type "grub" ; type "find /boot/grub/stage1" ; note the resulting numbers in the form (hdX,Y); type "root (hdX,Y)" (replacing X and Y with whatever numbers you got from your "find /boot/grub/stage1" command) and hit ; type "setup (hdX,Y)" (replacing X and Y again) ; type "quit" ; and reboot without the CD. Of course, I was so pleased at finally being able to work successfully in the shell, with these clear instructions, that I didn't realize I was doing exactly the wrong thing. The community docs page wasn't written too well, so this time I really did edit it to put the foregoing advice later. After all, I wanted Grub in the MBR, not in the root partition of the Linux drive -- as I realized when I rebooted and found that we just sailed right on back into Windows. If it's in the Linux drive, Windows will just take over. Grub needs to intercept it, and therefore it seemed unavoidable that Grub must be in the MBR. I did think about installing Boot Magic. If I recalled correctly, there was a copy of it on my PartitionMagic CD. But simpler, I thought, would be better. Now that I had put Grub onto the Linux drive, would I have to answer Grub questions twice? The webpage just mentioned also had the instructions I needed, to restore Grub to the MBR, but I was no longer sure what effect that would have. So I bit the bullet and reinstalled Ubuntu from the CD, after unplugging the other hard drives temporarily. I tried reinstalling without first deleting or reformatting the partitions into which I had already installed Ubuntu. I was curious as to how this might affect the installation process. It didn't seem to make any difference. I still opted to check the "Format?" box in the Prepare Partitions dialog, and I still had to retype my preferred names for the partitions and make sure that the sizes were right. Before I was done, I made the discovery, mentioned above, that I should maybe have included a /boot partition. So the list of eight partitions, above, reflects this realization. And with this realization, it seemed like I had better use a full-blown partition manager; the one in the installer didn't seem up to it. I tried GParted again, this time from within Ubuntu rather than from its own live CD, and this time it ran just fine; but I couldn't get it to delete the swap partition, and without that I couldn't rejigger the other partitions as needed. I tried QTParted from the Knoppix CD, but it seemed to function about the same as GParted. I rebooted the PM CD, which worked now, and used it to set up the same structure as before: one Unallocated partition big enough to accommodate the first three Ubuntu partitions as primaries, and the rest in an extended partition. Multiple comments, by now, had made clear that there was no need for a 4GB swap; but having seen how hard it was to work with, I figured I'd just leave it at that. I resumed the Ubuntu installation effort, having just discovered the Super Grub Disc, which apparently would have let me restore my MBR without any of the foregoing. (Sigh.) This time around, I discovered that you get significantly different functionality, in the Prepare Partitions dialog, if you accept Ubuntu's treatment of an Unformatted partition (from PM) as if it were a formatted partition -- if, that is, you use the Edit Partition button instead of deleting that partition and using the New Partition button. I also rediscovered that Ubuntu would not import WinXP settings if I didn't have that disk plugged in. (Sigh!) But, you know, when the dust settled, it was done, and I seemed to have a successful dual-boot, dual-drive machine.

PartitionMagic Error #510

PartitionMagic 8.0: Partition Magic (note that it's spelled both ways, as one word or as two, on various webpages) Error #510: "The version of the file system is not supported." I got this when trying to delete a partition. When I used PM to check for errors, none were found. Symantec says, "An updated version of PartitionMagic is required to operate on this new version of the file system. Visit www.symantec.com for information about updated versions of PartitionMagic." It's a FAT32 partition, and PM 8 created it, so that's obviously not right. On this particular drive, I had no Linux partitions. I had two FAT32 partitions and one NTFS partition. One of the FAT32 partitions -- the one I was trying to delete -- had been an NTFS partition, but when I got the 510 error, I used PM to convert it to FAT32, in hopes that it would then be deletable. It wasn't. I did have two Linux partitions on another drive in the system. I'd had them there for a while. They had not previously been a problem. They were on a SATA drive. The one I was now trying to delete was on an IDE drive. So unless PM was just going out and looking for trouble, the existence of a Linux partition somewhere in the system did not seem to be the explanation for the error message. (See exjoburger's blog and kclee's post for more on that.) (For future reference, I also found a page for Partition Magic Gripes.) I think the problem originated when I was trying to install Windows XP Professional. At a certain point, there were lots of crashes and reboots -- some organic, some artificially induced by the typically impatient resident human who just wanted the machine to shut down and/or reboot immediately. Unlike PM, Cute Partition Manager (see the Wikipedia entry for PartitionMagic) said this, when I tried to delete the recalcitrant partition: "Error saving partition table. Reason: Physical sector address check failed." I had already run CHKDSK /R from the Windows XP CD Recovery Console. It had not solved the problem. Partition Logic 0.68 reported the partitions incorrectly, locked the CD drive, wouldn't let me reboot with Ctrl-Alt-Del, and wouldn't use my mouse, so I tossed it. The Hitachi Drive Fitness Test said the drive was fine. I downloaded and burned the ISO for GParted, which would supposedly include TestDisk. Somebody said TestDisk was also in Ubuntu, in which I am composing this message right now; but I can't find it. GParted is a raw program, of the type you'd expect from something as techie as Linux has been. While I was thinking of all the data I'd lose if the thing screwed up, it was flashing all kinds of rapid messages at me as it configured itself: FAILED this, SUCCESS at that. There was lots of FAILED. Then it came to a language selection screen, and I had to be impressed that apparently its instructions are available in 33 languages. But then I wound up at a place where I didn't even have a prompt, just a flashing cursor, at the bottom of a page full of "failed opcode was: unknown" remarks. The note at the top of the page said, "VESA should always work." So I typed VESA and hit Enter. It didn't work. It did give me a gparted ~# prompt, but I don't speak gparted, so I typed Exit. I thought that would reboot the system, but instead I was actually pleased that it put me at a screen with some instructions. They gave me the GParted homepage link, and also said that TestDisk (among others) was a program available at the console, which I think meant the keyboard. I typed testdisk and hit Enter. This gave me an option of choosing among several partitions, none of which was the right size to be the one I was looking for. So I chose Quit. That didn't quite do it, so I tried other combinations, including Ctrl-Alt-Del, which seemed to be the answer. Back in Windows XP Professional, I went into Computer Management. It gave me the option to delete the offending partition. I had either not known or forgotten this, else I'd have tried it first, but somebody mentioned it on a website I found along the way, and now its time had come. I right-clicked on the offending partition and chose the Delete Logical Drive option. I got a message saying, "The request cannot be completed because the volume is open or in use." But then I got an option to force deletion, and I said Yes, dammit, die! I bailed out of Windows to see how PartitionMagic (which I generally ran from the CD) would report the outcome. At startup, PM said it had detectged an error 111 on a certain partition, and it offered to correct it. I said sure. After a moment, I was in the main PM screen and, yes, that screwed-up partition was now unallocated space. Moreover, the adjacent NTFS volume, which PM had reported as having errors, had errors no more. The unallocated space was 40GB. I wanted to use the first 20GB of it in an NTFS partition. PM created that without a problem. I wanted to add the remaining 20GB to the adjacent partition, the one that had been NTFS all along. But when I tried to add it, PM gave me a 510 error. I tried again. This time, it worked. I checked all partitions for errors, on this drive and on the other drives in my system. This yielded an interesting result. The partitions on this drive, as I say, were now looking good. But so were the partitions on other drives! I had done nothing to repair them; but the process of repairing the one troublesome partition seems to have persuaded PM that the others were fine too. This made me think that I was getting the 510 error, not because of a problem on this particular drive, but because PM was unhappy with the existence of a Linux partition on another drive. It seemed to me that PM may proceed by polling all drives at the outset, and that this poll may inform PM that (a) there is a Linux partition somewhere in the system and/or (b) there is an improperly mounted partition somewhere in the system. Fixing an error in one place, it seemed, would remove the reports of errors elsewhere. This possibility raised the thought that perhaps one could eliminate errors on one disk by fixing them on another. Say you have a partition that you can't delete or resize because Linux thinks it has a 510 error or was improperly dismounted. Add another hard drive to the system, a drive that definitely does have such errors. Use PM, TestDisk, Computer Management, or other tools to repair the problem on that other drive. Now see if PM still thinks your original drive is messed up. It seemed to me that I was getting a lot of "improperly dismounted" error reports from PM in recent months. They may have been legitimate. But now I wondered if maybe some of them were false alarms. Back in Windows XP, I returned to the Twilight Zone. As soon as I booted up, the partition that I had deleted and recreated was there. Correction: it was *still* there. Files that I had placed on it before going out to PM and "deleting" it were sitting there in Windows Explorer, looking at me. I checked the partition's properties. Sure enough, it had been shrunk to 20GB. But PM had plainly not erased it. I told Computer Management to check the disk for file system errors. Computer Management took a long time, but ultimately it worked.