FC2 ate my system

[Sean Estabrooks]

On Wed, 26 May 2004 14:38:58 +0000
"Roy Brown" <brown_r at hotmail.com> wrote:

Hi Roy,

> Well, it looks like I hit the dreaded dual-boot bug.  I hadn't realized it 
> affected Win2K in addition to WinXP.  After failing to boot into my Windows 
> partition, I decided to give up on FC2.  I tried reinstalling my previous 
> Linux (Libranet 2.8) in the hope that it would fix the broken boot stuff.  
> No luck.  Then I tried a "repair" with Windows...failure.  Then I tried to 
> reinstall Windows from scratch (including deleting all 
> partitions)...failure.  Any ideas what to try next?  I just want a working 
> Windows system again.  I didn't see anything about LBA mode in my BIOS 
> options (Albatron MB with i845PE chipset).

It's unfortunate your attempts to remedy the small problem led to
much worse consequences than were necessary.    Not sure why
you can't install Windows now, that'd be a Microsoft problem.   
Promise you that this problem didn't do any permanent damage
and most people haven't had to reinstall everything.   Installing
Fedora again it should just work.   

> PS: this is an amazingly bad bug to let into a release.  Is there going to 
> be a "fixed" version of FC2?  I would have thought that a bug this bad would 
> have warranted pulling the release until it was fixed.  It doesn't just not 
> install, it screws up your system.  Was this problem in FC2T3 or was it 
> introduced in the final release?

Yes,  as testers we really let ourselves down on this one.   Would 
have been nicer if we had figured out a better solution to this before the
release date.   All we can do now is deal with it and move forward.
Maybe we need more testers who use dual boot and are good at
debugging such things.   This problem doesn't even affect everyone 
who dual boots and doesn't hurt anyone that isn't dual booting at all.

Cheers,
Sean