So I can’t say for sure what happened, but I think I know. This is my story of how installing Vista lost my data partition. Read on if you care.
Over lunch I was going to start the Vista migration thing on my laptop. I have 2 partitions for operating systems, and one big one for data. I usually run part linux (suse or ubuntu) and part windows.
So, here is what I did.
I remove a 30GB ext3 and a 2GB swap partition in windows xp disk manager. Now I have – in order:
* 30GB NTFS
* 32GB Free Space
* 90GB or so FAT32.
I think they are all primary partitions (Can’t say for sure anymore).
Now I install Vista. Tell it to install to the free space. This was the middle clicky click option, saying something about 32GB and free space. I double checked it. I was never asked anything about partitions or filesystems, just this generic mix of where to install.
Vista finishes, rock on….where is my 90GB FAT32 partition? Gone, lost, now showing free space.
I mucked around in fdisk & qtparted in knoppix. I didn’t get the partition back (at least with my files on it). Probably because I never documented the partition table and I was only guessing at starting cylinder numbers. Vista was showing 32.01GB partition, so it may or may not be slightly bigger than 32GB. I gave up and just copied my data back from elsewhere.
After Vista installed, I now had an extended partition with only the Vista 32GB logical partition in it. This is a 130GB extended partion starting where the XP partition ends until the end of the disk. The first XP partition is still good. I am assuming the Vista installer clobbered the rest of the disk just to add the extended. I REALLY don’t remember it asking accept or deny.
So, backup your stuff and use knoppix and qtparted for partioning.
jeremy vista
New version of Xesxupdate.pl released 4/8/2007.
This version adds support for VMware’s new bundled patches, such as ESX-6431040. It will support both installation and checking for the bundled patches.
Download Xesxupdate-1.4-beta.pl (322) here.
You add the bundled patch to your updates.list with 1 line per patch inside the bundled patch. Here are the example lines from ESX-6431040.
ESX-6431040/ESX-1161870
ESX-6431040/ESX-3416571
ESX-6431040/ESX-5011126
ESX-6431040/ESX-7737432
ESX-6431040/ESX-7780490
ESX-6431040/ESX-8174018
ESX-6431040/ESX-8852210
ESX-6431040/ESX-9617902
Here is my sample updates.list file from my lab.
The rest of the setup is the same as version 1.2, as documented here.
jeremy esx3
UPDATE: Xesxupdate.pl version 1.3 is out
As of March 29, we now have a new type of patch for ESX3. A bundled patch. This is nothing more than a bunch of patches inside a single patch directory with a shell script provided by VMware that will install them all. You can identify a bundled patch by it’s patch naming convention reading the download page, or looking in the extracted directory.
See http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/esx-6431040-patch.html
This means Xesxupdate.pl version 1.2 will not work with ESX-6431040. Nothing terrible will happen, it will just fail to even query the status.
A new version exists, but I want to test it more. Check back soon. This version will hack in support for this type of patch, by allowing you to specify something like ESX-6431040/ESX-5011126 in your updates.list file. Not great, but I have very limited time in my life.
Also, is VMware now scheduling patches? They call this last set the “March patches” here. Nevermind those other March patches from the 5th. Keep watch end of April to see if it is a monthly thing.
While I am here and frusterated, we really need a rollup. Patching a box now takes FOREVER. Remember we are restarting the management agents 32 times during the patching process. I declare this officially unacceptable.
jeremy esx3