win7 on 10 Gb partition hoses your mbr

Hi,

I have installed windows-7 beta and recently the rc-1 on a 10 Gb partition. It installed without the 100 mb install partition and without any errors as I only had 10 Gb left on my Maxtor to give win7 a spin.

Win7 seems to run ok for a couple of hours than start to develop corruption errors on the ntfs drive, but no warnings are given. After a normal shutdown the mbr of the drive turns out to be hosed !

This has happened to me twice now and is really annoying as there are NO warnings from win7 at all !

You just shutdown normally to find your drive totally empty (or so it seems) the next morning. Very scary especially for clueless peeps...

I have seen similar reports concerning this behaviour in other win7 forum and the reason for win7 to blow itself up is probably the lack of drive space on the partition (10 Gb).

Any other testers here who can confirm this behaviour ?

I hope they fixed this in the RTM version as this is a ms product unworthy and more like amateur behaviour.

cheers...

intrax said:

Hi,

I have installed windows-7 beta and recently the rc-1 on a 10 Gb partition. It installed without the 100 mb install partition as I only had 10 Gb left on my Maxrtor to give win7 a spin.

Win7 seems to run ok for a couple of hours than start to develop corruption errors on the ntfs drive, but no warnings are given. After a normal shutdown the mbr of the drive turns out to be hosed !

This has happened to me twice now and is really annoying as there are NO warnings from win7 at all !

You just shutdown normally to find your drive totally empty (or so it seems) the next morning. Very scary especially for clueless peeps...

I have seen similar reports concerning this behaviour in other win7 forum and the reason for win7 to blow itself up is probably the lack of drive space on the partition (10 Gb).

Any other testers here who can confirm this behaviour ?

I hope they fixed this in the RTM version as this is a ms product unworthy and more like amateur behaviour.

cheers...

hey and welcome to SF

I actually have seen that 7 before on win 7 7000 beta. It hosed three straight drives and their mbrs. No choice but to reformat etc. First you should tell us abt your system and second upgrade to a much newer build of win 7

Hope this has helped
Ken

hi zigzag3143 and thanks your welcome...

My system is an Athlon-64, 1Gb, 2x IDE (1x 250Gb seagate, 1x 300Gb maxtor)
different partitons triple boot winxp sp3, osx leopard and windows-7 testing...

Really a couple of years old by now, but holding up remarkably...

BTW no reformat necessary... just reinstall of mbr and partition table

So luckily I was able to recover from this situation totally unscaved, but I'm sure many noobs will fall victim to this ugly trap from the devils from Redmond. Thats why I wanted to report this...

intrax said:

hi zigzag3143 and thanks your welcome...

My system is an Athlon-64, 1Gb, 2x IDE (1x 250Gb seagate, 1x 300Gb maxtor)
different partitons triple boot winxp sp3, osx leopard and windows-7 testing...

BTW no reformat necessary... just reinstall of mbr and partiton table

So luckily I was able to recover from this situation totally unscaved, but I'm sure many noobs will fall victim to this ugly trap from the devils from Redmond...

intrax

As long as you are off 7000 beta the problem has been fixed. Win 7 ate 3 drives of mine (something abt the i/o writing) and as soon as i upgraded to 7100 it stopped.

Ken

Didn't it warn you that you needed at least 16 GB to install? I've upgraded several builds, and it always warned me if I didn't have at least 16 GB free.



The Windows 7 RC system requirements:

• 1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 GB RAM (32-bit) / 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available disk space (32-bit) / 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

A virgin installation of x86 takes up 13GB, so no way you'll get 10GB to work. But it should at least warn you!

@dnorris
Nope, no warnings, no upgrade however but fresh install, I was able to install to a 10 Gb preformatted ntfs partition (Acronis disk director) without ANY complaints whatsoever...

@DJG
Test it yourself ! It will install to a 10 GB partition as I explained. It was just after the mbr disaster I started investigating what was wrong here and learned it needed at least 16 Gb.

Hopefully avoiding future victims...