Live USB messed up my Windows 7 partition?

[clockworkangel]

Hi everyone!

First off, I am a returning Fedora user. The last time I used it was Fedora Core 7. I recently tried out Ubuntu, and found it a bit buggy and unstable. So I decided to return to Fedora.

I presently run Windows 7, which sucks up the entire hard drive, except for a 25GB hidden ASUS recovery partition (for recovering the OEM Windows). To play it safe, I decided to try out the live USB creator so that I wouldn't have any accidents with my hard drive. I followed the Fedora wiki instructions to the letter, and used the USB creator program with ease to transfer the Fedora 17 ISO to my USB flash drive.

After setting my BIOS to boot from a USB flash drive, Fedora booted up in no time. I found it very stable and snappy. In fact, I thought to keep it around on USB to use as a "recovery" stick. My first order of business was to do a "yum update". After that (and a reboot into Fedora again), I only installed Java, OpenOffice, and Gparted. That's it.

Last night, I decided to take out the USB stick and boot into Windows to check my email. Lo and behold, my PC couldn't detect a bootable drive. After much hair-tearing, I finally figured out from Gparted that my Windows partition (the only partition other than the ASUS recovery partition) was no longer set to active/bootable. In fact, it was the ASUS recovery partition that was set with the "boot" flag. I fixed that in short order, and was finally able to boot into Windows.

My question is, what caused this? Is it safe to stick in my live USB stick again? Was it the live USB creator program (provided by Fedora for Windows) that did this? Or was it the live USB itself?

Has anyone else observed such an issue before?

Thanks in advance!

[anishjp]

Hi

I have created a live USB (Fedora 14) from my host windows 7 machine. I did install a couple of packages in that usb stick after that. Whenever I want to login into Fedora in the usb stick, I just press F8 during boot up which takes me to the multi boot menu and choose the usb stick to boot from instead of changing it in BIOS! I have used this live USB stick (x32 & x64) in different laptops and works perfectly!

Regards,
Anish

[bendib]

That is a very strange issue, and understanding Linux, I think that fedora probably wasn't responsible unless you did it yourself by accident. I also should note that some configurations will use the recovery bootloader to start windows. If your recovery partition was set to bootable (and not responsible for booting the real OS), it would start recovery mode, not say no bootable device detected. Sounds to me like your BIOS was being a turd. Also Windows 7 uses an MBR bootloader I believe, so you would still see something. Perhaps the reboot fixed it. Or did you reboot more than once?