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Ubuntu stole my hdd

O

okb

Member
Thought it'd be fun to slap Ubuntu on my laptop this evening. Well it didn't go quite as smoothly as I had hoped and I didn't really have any time to tinker thanks to school work. So I boot back into Windows, only to find that Ubuntu left me with 42MB free space. Can I merge this back into my C: drive in XP Home? It's been ages since I've done any disk management with Windows stock utils and I'm not sure if that's even possible (somehow I doubt it). I'd like to have my entire hard disk back until I have more time to devote to playing with things (well, if wifi had worked it might be a different story).

TIA
 
Damnit, that's what I figured. My own stupid fault anyways, I should have figured what it was going to do but was too tired to realize it. Ironically, we were talking sleep-deprivation in psych class today....spooky.

The Intel 2915abg chipset, it detected it just fine but when I tried to use it to connect nothing happened. Wired worked no problems, but I never use it since I'm always in another room. Ah well, when I have more time I'll play some more.
 
Well I don't want Linux on this computer for the time being, so that won't help much. Are there any similar utils for Windows? I have PM 6, but that's pretty old and I don't know if it would even work on XP.
 
If you want to boot off of a knoppix cd they have a utility called 'qtparted' that can resize partitions and such. I don't know how well it works at enlarging ntfs stuff, but it's something to try.

With knoppix it's a 'live cd' and the OS runs directly off of the cdrom drive without needing to install anything on the harddrive.

Of course do your backups first... resizing partitions are tricky even under ideal situations. They simply weren't designed for this sort of thing in the beginning.

Also lookup on how to use the Windows XP install cd to get into 'recovery console' and run the fixmbr command. You'll need to do that in order to re-setup the XP bootloader into the MBR instead of the Linux grub (or lilo) bootloader. That is if you want to get rid of Ubuntu completely.


btw
For the Intel chipset the driver that is used is called 'ipw2200' (the intel 2200 is the bg-only version of your abg card, I beleive..)

If the card is correctly detected and has had it's drivers configured then you can find out for certain by going:
sudo iwconfig

and it should show all aviable ethernet connections. If your card is setup then one of those will be your wifi card and will show all the 'wireless extensions'.

If that doesn't work then try:
modprobe ipw2200

If that doesn't work and such try searching thru Ubuntu's forums or posting their for specific information on how to get your card working under Ubuntu. The drivers for this card are fairly good and lots of people have them so it shouldn't be to difficult to get running.

(if your lucky it'll work by default out of knoppix.)
 
All I have is the crappy "modified" disk that comes with the laptop, it's not even a real Windows disk so I doubt that's even an option. I did try running it once to see if I could do a re-install without all the bloat they put on it when you buy it, but all it would do is put it all back to factory or quit. Maybe I'll try my older copy of PM and see if that'll fly, I'm a little more comfortable with something designed for Windows natively than something that's not.

Yeah I think you're right about the 2200. I think I found a file that was for the 2915 chipset, but I can't remember atm. It did show both my NIC and my WiFi cards in the Network options, so it detected it. It was just when I tried to actually connect that it didn't like to. No error messages or anything, it just wouldn't do anything so it could very well need an updated driver. It's the latest Intel offering I think, so the install cd's might not have full support out of the box. But yes you're right, it's a popular chipset so there's stuff out there for them and I remember seeing something, but like I said I can't really remember exactly what it was and if I downloaded it lol. I'm sure I did and just don't remember. 🙂
 
Hey, could I use a friends XP disk to run fixmbr? I'm assuming the only difference is my disk is tailored for Toshiba and has removed all of the functionality other than the default.
 
Your Toshiba disc is probably a restore disc, so once you delete all of the partitions you should be able to use that to re-install windows.
 
I agree with the above - you need to get a knoppix cd (download and burn if you don't have one), boot the knoppix CD, and use qtparted which comes with it to delete the ubuntu partition and resize (enlarge) the windows partition. You might need to reboot after deleting the ubuntu partition since qtparted allows only one operation each time. Also note that after you nuke the ubuntu partition, the boot loader (grub) will stop working because some of its files are in that partition. So you will need to use the windows install CD to repair the master boot record (this is a simple operation) after you're done with the partition resizing stuff.
 
Hey, I had a similar problem with Ubuntu resizing a drive, but it also made it unaccessible to windows. I read up online and tried the fixmbr thing on the repair option and made things much worse. What I did to fix it was use TestDisk, http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html

That fixed the partition back to where it was before Ubuntu and I think my information is still good. I would reccomend it as a last resort, if the other options go bad.

I think my problem occurred when I choose the option to use the largest area of free space. Recently I tried it again, this time specifying what to do and it didn't seem to mess things up. Although this was on a different computer and the master hard drive, so things were a little different.
 
Thanks for all the help everyone. I did a little playing around and I now have a comfy 75G Windows partition and the rest is used for Ubuntu. Now all I have to do is take the time to learn how to do stuff with it. 🙂 Probably just a matter of sitting down and pouring over all the info online instead of trying to click my way through, heh. Cheers.
 
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