Windows 7 is Windows Vista After Rehab
My copy of Windows 7 Home Premium arrived on Friday. On Sunday night, I began doing some housekeeping on my computer to prepare for the upgrade: I uninstalled programs I was no longer using, cleaned up unnecessary files, defragmented, etc. To finish it all off, I decided to finally delete that 10 GB recovery partition Dell put on my computer when I bought it. I've never used it and probably will never need it, so I got rid of it.
That was a mistake. Or rather, I didn't anticipate the problems it would cause, which was my mistake. When I rebooted the computer, rather than faced with the choice of booting Windows Vista or Kubuntu 9.04, I saw "Grub Error 22," and my heart skipped a beat. I had killed my boot record!
The good news in this situation, of course, was that my filesystem was intact. I cast about for the Kubuntu 9.04 Live CD from which I had installed Jaunty back in April . . . and couldn't find it. Fortunately, I did find the CD for Kubuntu 7.10--old, but perfectly usable. I booted into Gutsy Gibbon and verified that yes, my Windows installation was intact. I just…