Hi everyone.

This is my first post here. I hope you dont think its rude to jump in with a question on my first post, but Im pretty confused just now.

Ill explain my situation.

I have installed Ubuntu on to my computer and it wont work.
I installed it using the Live CD. And it worked fine with Grub boot manager until I booted into windows.

I would boot to windows ONCE, and the next time I switch on my machine it reboots over and over.


So reading up on it, I found that XP Doenst like Grub for some reason, and deletes it from the MBR or something ( I dont understand that btw ).

So I downloaded the Alternate CD and intsalled Lilo ussing it. This time when I go to boot, it just boots straight into XP.



Ive spent ages trying to work this out. My computers HDDs are both empty now due to formating my HD and Im geting sick of it, might just "give it to the man " to fix for me.



If there is anything anyone here can sugest Id really apreciate it. I really REALLY would cos I hate XP and refuse to use it anymore. Thank you in advance for any help.

Uh, XP and Grub get along just fine. I don't have Vista, but I've heard that Vista and Grub have some problems. Grub is generally a better and more feature filled bootloader than Lilo. I use the alternate install CD, and to my knowledge, it ONLY installs Grub, not Lilo(unless you've done something on your own) Are you getting any errors, like "Grub Error 17", or something like that? Are you on a RAID setup? How are you setting up your partitions?

It sounds to me like you might have two drives on a raid.

IGF

XP uses NTLDR as the boot loader. Grub and Lilo are Linux boot loaders. They can boot each other just like a big family.

NTLDR can boot 10 system. Lilo can do 27 and Grub probably has no limit.

They don't have a problem with each other and co-exist happily in any hard disk.

It is the users who can have a problem for not knowing how to use them.

The common problem is a user trying to be clever, doing a boot loader's job by altering the disk order, changing the Bios setting after the distros have already been installed and their partitions and disk numbers have been cast into stone.

Did you tell it to boot into XP by default? Perhaps you just need to hold down Shift right before it boots XP, that should open the lilo menu.

Not a solution, but just a correction.
XP works fine with Grub (or Lilo).

Part of Grub is installed in the MBR and Lilo is fully installed in the MBR. When you install windows, windows will install it's own bootloader in the MBR. You can only have one bootloader in the MBR.
When installing Linux, most distro's are clever enough to detect other installations (Linux, Windows) and add them to the menu. The windows install process does not do that (it might pickup other WIndows installations, no experience with that) and you loose access to the other installations. This can usually easily be fixed.