Remove Windows 7 Bootloader

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I recently put windows 7 on my PC. The first time I installed the 32 bit version, when I wanted to run the 64 bit version. It wasn’t a huge problem, I just put the install disk back in and installed the 64 bit over the 32 bit. The only problem with this was that there were two Windows 7 entries in the bootloader.

This weekend I decided that I needed some more space on the Windows 7 partition, which should have been simple, but since the Windows 7 partition was at the back of the hard drive I couldn’t add to it. So after I shrunk the Windows XP partition I tried to reinstall Windows 7 in the empty space, the only problem was that it didn’t get added to the bootloader, so I had to go into “diskpart” and make the second partition active if I wanted to boot Windows 7 and then go back and make the first partition active if I wanted to boot Windows XP. In addition, both of the Windows 7 entries were still listed in the XP bootloader, but neither of them would boot anything.

I decided that would just wipe Windows 7 and reset the Windows XP bootloader, and hopefully after reinstalling Windows 7 everything will be well again. Here’s how to remove the Windows 7 bootloader. (Will also work for Vista).

How To: Remove Windows 7 Bootloader

  1. Recover Console
  2. Fixboot
  3. Fixmbr

That’s all. Of course you should remember to backup everything just in case, but this worked for me.

Thanks to tech-recipes.com for pointing me in the right direction.

Maddie’s Birthday Banner

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A few weeks ago was a friend’s birthday. We decorated her locker and made a huge banner and put it up in the hallway at school. I took some pictures of it and stitched them together with a little Photoshop and some of my own hardwork. Since I didn’t take very smart pictures for a panorama Photoshop didn’t do a very good job, so I ended up putting them together by myself, it turned out alright.

I had to document this because of how big this banner was. Here it is:

Maddie's Birthday Banner
Maddie's Birthday Banner

Update: Make sure you actually go to the single post page for this post and don’t just stop and look on the homepage, it get’s cutoff by the sidebar.

WordPress Feature Request: Gallery Improvements

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I’ve been pretty happy with the new-ish WordPress gallery. I haven’t used it a whole lot, but for the Photos that I’ve taken it has worked decently. When they first released the new gallery, it seemed like a huge thing with tons of features, but it really isn’t. Sure the new image uploader is nice, and the gallery pages are cool, but if you want more than that, you’ll have to hack your way to what you want.

I made my gallery page display a thumbnail from the gallery next to the info. This looks great, but it only works when there is a photo in the first spot. If for some reason the photo that you tried to upload didn’t go, or you decided that you didn’t like it and deleted it then there’s nothing.

I would also like a simple feature that returns a random image from the gallery. There’s nothing that can do this. It would be great to be able to display a random image in my sidebar, or on gallery pages, but right now that’s impossible.

What I really want

The random image thing is simple, just the simplest template tag for a random gallery image. Maybe you could even specify posts that you don’t want included, but easy stuff.

The default gallery thumbnail is a little more complex, but not much. I want something that lets you choose an image from your post to be the ‘default gallery thumbnail’. Then a template tag that returns the default gallery thumbnails. Then you could even have it setup so that if you change your mind on a particular gallery, you can go back and change the default thumbnail.

I’ve been looking for a solution to this for awhile, maybe I’ll try to throw something together that accomplishes this.