I must apologize about this weekend. I had seriously messed up my computer in numerous ways.
First, my computer used to have seven partitions: one for system recovery (1.5 GB), one for Windows Vista (180 GB with all my files), one for Windows 7 (22 GB), two for testing DOS booting (10 GB and 2 GB), one for Ubuntu Linux (10 GB), and one for Ubuntu swap space (virtual memory, 500 MB). I had wanted to delete three of them, the Vista one and the two DOS ones, so I could install more programs on Windows 7 and gain about 30 GB of disk space.
I began by backing up everything; thankfully, it worked after some time. I had to deal with it halting when it ran into protected folders. Then I deleted the two DOS partitions. I did a reboot because it said some changes would take effect afterwards. Bad idea, because GRUB (boot loader for Linux) spat out Error 17 (partition not found) and did absolutely nothing. I had to locate my Ubuntu install disc, which I could not find. Instead, I found SystemRescueCd, which I used to run some commands. By accident, I formatted the Ubuntu partition and wrote the boot code to it. For several hours, I kept messing it up. I texted KingOfKYA for help.
I needed an Ubuntu disc, though, so I downloaded and burned one on our other computer. Upon booting the live CD, I started copying more files to the hard drive (backing up important data on Windows 7--not sure why I didn't do it before). Then, out of nowhere, the kernel crashed. KYA confirmed it was real and wondered how I could crash Linux unless something like the hard drive failed during the copy. (As of this post, I assume the disk froze or the USB cable wiggled a little loose, because some of the copied files failed and were corrupted.) A second copy worked until the strangest error came up. The disk ran out of space? With 550 GB used out of about 960? It made no sense until I researched file count limitations. Nope, I didn't violate that either; I don't have 4 million files on the drive. Odd. Drive works fine now.
Now to move on to fixing up the partitions. Gparted time! I deleted the Vista partition and Linux partition, grew the 7 one (both the extended and the logical it rests on) to the empty space, and created a new Linux one with leftover 30 GB. That took two hours.
Then, I moved on to finding the correct command to delete GRUB entirely and restore the Windows BOOTMGR. Windows 7 sprang to life and I was finally able to get back to what I needed. Now to copy all the files back from the external to the internal. Hey good, no errors! A couple programs didn't work because they were on the external, but I fixed most of them.
And that brings me up to now. I have to re-install Visual Studio 2008, Qt (on both Windows and Linux), and a number of other things.
That was fun!
Now please don't say what commands I should have run because the whole thing annoyed me when I found them out myself.