MBR Editing in Vista

I decided it was about time I shifted from a physical install of Ubuntu to a virtual one so I did that last week with VMWare Server. Quite impressed with that, but that might be another post.

Anyway after the install I was left with my old copy to delete and I needed to recover the space. Now once you have Linux installed it isn’t always as easy to remove. In Windows you can’t just delete non-Windows partitions and tell it to rebuild the master boot record.

Anyway after my past experience where I broke things using EasyBCD (my stupidity, not the program’s fault) I decided to look for something simpler.

In Vista you can’t just do “fdisk /mbr” like you did in earlier versions. You have to run the recovery CD or use a tool. So I went hunting and found MbrFix. Then it was a matter of “MbrFix /drive 0 fixmbr /vista” and my Vista boot loader was back in place. After that booted into GParted live CD, removed the Linux partitions and then reboot and extend Windows partition from within Windows. (In theory I could have done this using GParted but I prefer to use Windows native tools).

Thoughts on the Palm Pre

I see the Palm Pre has been launched today and it certainly is taking an interesting approach.

There is a video of the Palm Pre from CES 2009 here.

It is an all new device with no backward compatiability at this stage which I think isn't a bad thing given how dated PalmOS is now.

The concept looks quite good where you can pull together info from different email accounts, different contacts etc and use them all in whatever way you want. The user interface looks quite good too, and I don't think you can beat a real keyboard either.

It is interesting to note that there is no Flash but I don't think this is a major given that Adobe have written Flash for the iPhone which is the same CPU (never mind that Apple wouldn't let it be released) and that there is Flash for Linux. Talking of Linux I don't think that this is an open phone in the way that Google Android is - it is more just a platform for it.

Also more information here and here.

Looking forward to the GSM/UMTS version...