I lost my Windows partition, along with everything else

[K.I.L.E.R]

I want to get it back? No.
There are only 3 things that pissed me off when Gentoo decided to fail partitioning my drive during install and decided to kill my other 2 partitions despite it's settings.

I want to know, can I get by using only Linux?
Sometimes games.
Programming shouldn't be a problem, I can re-compile my project's source code at school.
I watch TV on my Leadtek DVB 1000T.

 

[Farid]

I lost my Windows partition, along with everything else

Now, we know how you lost your sanity, I guess.

I want to know, can I get by using only Linux?

As long as you don't absolutely want to play the latest games or demos, you can get by quite nicely on a Linux system.

Wine (or Cedega if you're willing to pay for it) would help you with the "sometimes games" part.

 

[hoom]

Youch! Ubuntu has managed to successfully partition for me without destroying everything but it freaked me out doing it.

 

[Skrying]

Youch! Ubuntu has managed to successfully partition for me without destroying everything but it freaked me out doing it.

Ubuntu has done very well every time when partitioning for me. Now, if only Linux could solve that gaming part. I do not find Wine very useful for anything most of the time.

 

[Humus]

Did you by any chance use gentoo's new graphical installer? If so, too late now, but I'd stay the heck away from it. I had the same thing happening to me just a couple of days ago. I had all partitions set up on the disk anyway. All I did was tell it to format the partitions I wanted to use for Linux. That went fine, but then it went and rewrote the partition table on a totally different disk as well, failed in the middle of it, and then stopped. The good news was that it only destroyed the partition table, so I was able to recover every file. Partition magic was able to restore the FAT32 partition on it, but didn't find the NTFS partition. But I could restore those files with GetDataBack. As for the gentoo installation itself, I unplugged all other drives and went back to using the traditional manual installation method which I find way more reliable.

 

[Farid]

While we're difting from the GNU/Linux topic to the partion manager topic:
http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/products/overview.jsp?pcid=sp&pvid=pm80

The one and only best partion tool on Windows. It's a bit pricey (70 bucks), but it's doing a mighty fine job. Never did let me down over the years, and I used it countless times.

 

[Humus]

It has let me down a number of times though, like destroying a few partitions that I have had to use recovery software to restore the files from, forced me to reinstall windows etc. etc. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any better tool out there. Most of the time it's working fine, but be extra cautious when dealing with your main windows partition, and always back up any important files you cannot afford to lose.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

I want to learn how to manually install Linux.
Once I installed Gentoo it wouldn't boot up into Gnome.
It mentioned something about OpenGL, wgl_(something) and then saying that Ati something doesn't exist.

WTF????

Then I got lost in the stupid command line. I only remembered 1 command, that was "ls". :?
When I put in my other HD, installed Windows onto it then I no longer had the bootstrap that gave me the option of selecting which OS I wanted to boot in.

Now I'm stuck. :?

 

[Humus]

I want to learn how to manually install Linux.

It's not that hard. Gentoo gives you step by step instructions in the installation manual (it's on the CD). Once you're on the commandline, open another terminal (Alt-F2, use Alt-F1 to toggle back (Alt-F3 if you need a third one etc.)). Just have the manual open in one terminal and do the installation on another one. Or better yet, use the LiveCD and get the graphical installer, but instead of using the graphical installer, just open a terminal window on the menu and type "sudo su -" to get root. Then you can install manually right there, and open a browser window and read the manual online. Much more comfortable than the txt version on the console. Plus you can browse the web in parallel with some installation steps that take a while, which is very nice.

When I put in my other HD, installed Windows onto it then I no longer had the bootstrap that gave me the option of selecting which OS I wanted to boot in.

Now I'm stuck. :?

Just boot your gentoo CD. Mount the disks like in the installation. Do the chroot step. Then redo the boot loader step. Reboot and you should be able to boot into Gentoo again.