jwestbury
October 27th, 2011, 07:45 PM
I'm working on a solution to create an automated recovery partition for Windows machines. My current idea is to use a stripped-down 10.04 install (currently trying with TurnKey Core) + ntfsclone to create and restore images of a Windows partition.
On my test machine, I've got a 250GB partitioned as follows:
/dev/sda1 - 30MiB partition for XOSL
/dev/sda2 - ~225GiB NTFS partition for Windows
/dev/sda5 - ~12GiB ext4 partition for Ubuntu
/dev/sda6 - ~500MiB swap partition
My installation process is as follows:
(1) Install XOSL.
(2) Install Windows.
(3) Repair XOSL.
(4) Install Ubuntu, with grub installed to /dev/sda5.
Now, based on guides I've found, this should work. And, indeed, I can boot Windows with XOSL. But when XOSL tries to boot my Ubuntu partition, I am brought to a blank screen with a flashing cursor, and grub never does anything.
FWIW, I've tried using XOSL to boot /dev/sda5 (the logical partition) as well as the primary partition on which it resides -- both yield the same result.
I know XOSL is pretty old at this point, so I'm not sure if anyone will be able to help.
If anyone knows of another way to set up a hotkey-based recovery partition for a Windows machine (boot Windows by default, boot Linux only when a hotkey is pressed at boot), I'd be glad to hear it.
On my test machine, I've got a 250GB partitioned as follows:
/dev/sda1 - 30MiB partition for XOSL
/dev/sda2 - ~225GiB NTFS partition for Windows
/dev/sda5 - ~12GiB ext4 partition for Ubuntu
/dev/sda6 - ~500MiB swap partition
My installation process is as follows:
(1) Install XOSL.
(2) Install Windows.
(3) Repair XOSL.
(4) Install Ubuntu, with grub installed to /dev/sda5.
Now, based on guides I've found, this should work. And, indeed, I can boot Windows with XOSL. But when XOSL tries to boot my Ubuntu partition, I am brought to a blank screen with a flashing cursor, and grub never does anything.
FWIW, I've tried using XOSL to boot /dev/sda5 (the logical partition) as well as the primary partition on which it resides -- both yield the same result.
I know XOSL is pretty old at this point, so I'm not sure if anyone will be able to help.
If anyone knows of another way to set up a hotkey-based recovery partition for a Windows machine (boot Windows by default, boot Linux only when a hotkey is pressed at boot), I'd be glad to hear it.