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Repartitioning Adventures!

So, I decided that I wanted to play with the Windows 7 beta, but that I didn’t want to overwrite my operating system on either computer.

I started with Bob 1.0, my poor sweet 5 year old computer with Windows XP on it. I used GParted off of a CD-Boot of Ubuntu to shrink the partition on my main drive and then partition the new, un-partitioned space left by the shrink process. Windows 7 took ages to install, and ran a little slow on Bob 1, but certainly ran much faster than I expected it to run in the first place. I half-way didn’t expect it to install at all.

So last night I decided to shrink the partition on my storage drive in Bob 2.0 (my much newer computer) and poke around on that. I have no idea why, but the process didn’t go NEARLY as smoothly on this computer. Some of you may have seen my panicked Tweets about it. Oh, then then to make it worse, I discovered that Vista has tools to do this built in, well after the fact :|

So anyway, I guess when Windows Vista first partitioned the drive, it left blank space at the very beginning of the drive. When I went to shrink the partition, it decided that it wanted to move the partition to the left. So it took 2 hours to read my partition (why?!) and another 2 and a half to move it and create the new partition.

So I cleaned my bathroom while I waited, since I’m moving in a couple of weeks and have to clean it at some point anyway. I kid you not, that bathroom is positively SPOTLESS. Even the crazy muddy parts of the bathtub where Xoie puts her paws. I had a lot of time to kill.

Anyway, 4.5 hours later when I could use my computer again, I went to get some pictures of my camera (The bathroom only killed about an hour) and Lightroom started freaking out at me. “ZOMG I can’t find your catalog!” … well, said catalog is stored on my storage drive that I just manipulated the partitions on. So I go to My Computer, and while I could see the new G: partition.. the original partition was nowhere to be found. I just about died. I panicked and mourned my lost data, then started wondering “well.. if the data is gone… where the heck is the 350 gigs of space?!”

So i went into the drive manager, and found my data partition! Yay! Windows had arbitrarily reassigned drive letters and changed it from Z: to F: which made it get lost, because F belongs to one of my removable devices (I think it’s my Rebel, iirc). So I changed the drive letter back to Z and I could access all my data and Lightroom stopped spazzing out.

So I did my photo stuff and set Windows 7 installing and went to bed, cause it was about 1 in the morning at that point.

So yet again, I haven’t gotten a chance to really poke around with Windows 7 but it looks pretty sweet from what I’ve done so far. I’ll be playing with it and will likely write a post about it in the near-ish future.