The recent switch to larger capacity hard drives allows for adding ubuntu and other distros into a mix with XP and Vista. Already dual booting the two versions of Windows the next stap was to see the latest 7.10 of ubuntu installed on the drive Vista is currently installed on.

Prior to 7.10 another distro saw the same error now seen with ubuntu installed mainly the "please insert system disk" error screen with BootPart 2.60 made by ...rtc. etc. there. At first it was a simple mistake of not seeing Grub installed on the root partition seeing a working dual boot with XP on a second drive after restarting the system a few times to finally get past the same insert system disk error. The default desktop did load however.

Upon seeing Vista reset as the default OS using the EasyBCD 1.7.1 tool available as a substitute to the BCDeditor seen in Vista unbuntu saw a reinstall to then see Grub installed to root also being mount point. The option for booting ubuntu on the Vista boot options was then working except for this type of error. The same error is also seen with some simply trying to dual boot XP with the 7.10 release on a system with only one hard drive. So far not troubleshooting guide refers to any type of repair method other then starting all over. Any ideas?

yeah a few ideas spring to mind.

1 linux users do not need or rely on some kind of enhancement to the ntldr or vista bootloaders....AFAIK your intro refers to a microsoft perception that you must have a ms bootloader.

2 Did you know that ms and linux has had many years of dual booting with grub lilo and other #nix bootloaders?

Can I suggest you have a gander at my signature and consider putting grub into your mbr.

Add as many entries you need to its bootini like file called
/boot/menu.lst....and its just a text file you edit with root powers and I suspect very easy compared to your current experience.

(3) and finally....grub when in the mbr...offers troubleshooting that craps on any bootloader than you think can troubleshoot in the ms world.

read my signature link for what you can do if you like.

and welcome to the world of grub

Even when seeing Grub as the default loader on an XP/ubuntu dual boot on one drive alone ubuntu will fail to load while XP still boots up. Grub4Dos loads XP and Vista alike without any problems. That would be an option to consider for seeing the 7.10 release there.

The installer seen for the live distro configures XP but not Vista into Grub when automatically installing that version of the boot loader. That went on good with the 3rd party tool used to see the distro begin to load until the "please insert system disk" error comes up and ubuntu simply won't run. That same identical error was seen when trying to install Mandriva 2006 where that has a universal boot loader that immediately added Vista as well as XP as boot options but also failed to load.

I am not trying to be nasty but is there a trend where your distro choices are fedora 4, zenwalk and mdv 2006?

I am sure your zen may be more recent...but I suggest around 9 April 2008.1 for Mandriva arrives

On an older system here Zenwalk 2.8 and later 3.0 was mainly tried out while in live cd form and never saw an installation to one of the four hard drives in use at the time. That build saw two older ide models as well as the two sata models moved into the current one. I also ran Mepis and Gentoo as well.

Mandriva 2006 was installed with ease there along with an attempt to see Solaris 10 up and running. Knoppix was also kept onhand in live cd form as a data rescue tool. I just recently downloaded the RC1 beta for Mandriva 2008 so I'm still waiting to the final release on that while planning more then one distro. Since Knoppix hasn't seen a new release and wasn't available in iso form for download the obvious choice for a live distro was 7.10 also a Debian release.

The thing to mention here is that I'm not the only one running into the "cannot load from hard drive: please insert system disk" error while Grub still sees a good install. Someone else with only one drive running XP is also running into the same failure when installing 7.10 from a live cd. When deleting the current root on the Vista primary and seeing ubuntu 7.10 go onto the XP second sata drive it then saw the Vista boot loader but not XP's and still won't finish the stage 2 part of the installation for some reason until looking at the menu.lst file to find no entries? I'm not sure if notepad was the right text editor for looking inside that however.