Redhatter’s Web Blog

Yep… it’s another gripe… this time, Symantec’s (really Roxio’s tool) system recovery tool, “GoBack” is in my sights.

For a while, my father has been talking about getting back into using Linux. He recently replaced his dying IBM ThinkPad T22 laptop, with a much more modern LG P1 Express. The machine came pre-loaded with Windows XP, which was fine, we intended to dual-boot. On went the necessities (Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice) and critical utilities like those provided in the Norton SystemWorks suite.

Well, the other day, we decided to actually do it. The machine has a 100GB SATA drive, plenty of space for both operating systems to coexist. We installed Symantec (actually PowerQuest’s product) PartitionMagic, and told Windows to shove over, leaving 40GB for Linux. It wanted to reboot to do the resize, this is fine — we shut down and rebooted as advised.

On the bootup, we get a dreadded blue screen (BSOD-like, but wasn’t a kernel oops) telling us that it can’t resize the partition with GoBack loaded. WTF? They’re both Symantec products?! Surely they should be aware of these limitations? Ahh well, seemingly not, so we reboot again disable GoBack via its bootloader menu, then try again. The resize goes off without a hitch, and we re-enable GoBack, and carry on.

A few days later, we got around to actually installing Linux. We decided on a hand installation of Gentoo Linux/x86 — dispite the laptop being a 64-bit capable Centrino Core Duo machine, we figured 32-bit would be safest for now. I pop in the LiveCD (actually, the 2006.1 prerelease… I never bothered to download a newer CD since this one worked.), and apart from the onboard ethernet card not working (fixed using a USB ethernet dongle), everything installed smoothly.

An oddity I noticed when I ran fdisk… Windows XP is installed on a NTFS partition (one of the reasons why I used PartitionMagic, rather than chancing it with parted). NTFS partitions show up as Type 0×07 (NTFS/HPFS) in fdisk… this partition was showing up as type 0×44 (Unknown), which I thought was bizzare. It was about 60GB in size, and thus I figured it had the NTFS partition inside, so I tacked an Extended partition on the end of that, and inserted my Linux partitions as logical partitions.

Everything was fine… grub installed without a hitch to the master boot record, in a few hours I had the machine booting off the HDD into Linux, talking to the network. Later I got X working (VESA for now… ATI X1400s aren’t supprted yet), and within a day, I had KDE, and all the basics installed.

At this point, I hadn’t tried rebooting into Windows yet … I assumed it was still working. I was badly mistaken. Windows XP would start to load, then flash up a BSOD (a real one), and reboot. Hammering F8, I managed to get it to show me what the BSOD was about… Bloody GoBack2k.sys! It broke normal Windows boot, it broke Safe Mode, and it broke the “last known good configuration”.

Right… so I searched and searched… nothing. Symantec’s website only told me that dual-booting with Linux was not supported: Helpful fellas… might I remind you it’s not your PC, thus I don’t feel it’s your right to tell people what they can run. It was looking like a reinstall, which I was not keen on.

Then I twigged… earlier I had noticed Windows XP’s partition was of type 0×44… what if Windows was looking for a partition of type 0×7? Windows XP is pretty stupid like that — where such a trivial difference would not phase Linux (so long as it had the filesystem drivers for the root), it really breaks Windows badly. The fix was as simple as:

# fdisk /dev/sda
Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-7): 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): 7
Command (m for help): w

Soon as I did that… Windows XP was happy, I simply booted in, then uninstalled GoBack. The machine is now happily booting both OSes.

I post this here, for people who find myself in the same ugly situation. For those who are about to install SystemWorks… I recommend you do not install this shoddy piece of software. The rest of SystemWorks does its job rather well IMHO… but I say again, steer clear of GoBack — It Is Broken!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.