Dual Boot Quest

[owlectomy]

What I did: In trying to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04, I accidentally installed GRUB on... all my partitions. Including the Windows boot loader partition.

So, even though Windows was still on the partition, I couldn't boot up into it. I just got a blinking cursor.

After trying various fixes I found online, nothing in particular seemed to be achieving anything, so I ended up requesting a set of recovery discs from Dell.

Turns out, reinstalling Windows didn't really do anything. GRUB was still on the boot loader partition, preventing me from getting into Windows.

So, the nuclear option: BACK UP MY DATA, erase all my partitions and just install Linux on top of everything.

And then try to reinstall Windows.

Except that Linux formatted the partition to ext4 or some such format, which Windows can't read.

So, create a new NTFS partition for Windows. Simple, right? Except that I can't partition the drive while it's still mounted, and I can't unmount the drive because that would mean unmounting my whole operating system.

Okay. Go back to the Linux recovery CD, which will let me run Linux off the disc without having to mount my hard drive. And repartition it from there! YAY PARTITION VICTORY.

Well, it's still running and it might take a couple hours. Hopefully success this time.

Linux: it's complicated!
Windows: it's also complicated!