Hi all,

Background: Just built a system using 2 SATA HDDs and 1 SATA CD/DVD drive to be used as a dual boot Vista/Ubuntu workstation. When I got the hardware together and ran memtest and was satisfied it was fine, I booted into the Ubuntu 7.10 live CD I have been using successfully for other Ubuntu installs. It worked fine. Then I rebooted and started with installing Vista, since I've done hundreds of windows/linux dual boots over the years and it has always been best to start with Windows and install Linux afterwards.

Problem: After the successful Vista install, no LiveCD of any kind will work on this system. If I use my trusty Ubuntu install CDs (I have several, they are all known to be working -- have been used before) I got dropped to the initramfs prompt right away. If I use any of the half a dozen or so Knoppix CDs I have (also known to be good and tested/used before) they give me the "can't find knoppix filesystem" error and leave me at the limited prompt. I've even tried booting into the Sabayon DVD, and that doesn't work (though the screen just blanks out on that one).

Since I know Knoppix cheat codes a little better, I assumed it was a problem with the Vista filesystem or something and ran ``knoppix toram'', but that didn't help. I haven't tried all the other Knoppix cheat codes yet. It is an SATA system and I need to rsync something off one of the disks before installing ubuntu on this system, so I don't want to disable everything.

So, knowing for sure these boot/Live CDs are fine, (no need to recommend checking the media), what could be causing this? And it was working before I installed Vista on one of the HDDs (the other HDD has my previous Ubuntu install from another machine on it in tact).

Thanks for any ideas.

Dave

P.S. It's an Abit IP35 with core 2 Quad Q6600 & 4 gigs of G.Skill 2x2GB RAM if that info helps identify any notorious hardware issues.

Vista introduced a new boot loader (Vista's boot is as incompatible with Win9x, NT and XP as it is with Linux!). But it's still possible to dual-boot with Vista (I'm doing it myself) - it's just a bit more challenging ;-)

Here are a couple of links that might help:

http://www.apcstart.com/3895/how_vis...ooting_nirvana
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27680

Thanks for the info, paulsm4. I wound up putting in an IDE DVD drive and that worked well enough and I was able to install Ubuntu. Ubuntu found the Vista partition and it's working fine to boot between both.

Now, however, I'm on to my next problem.... the default BIOS setting for the SATA drives (some type of IDE emulation) works for Windows, but doesn't work well for Linux -- thus having trouble detecting the SATA drives. O joy. At least I can now install Linux.

Thanks again.

Dave