I was able to create a second partition on my flash drive and create a bootable Ubuntu 10.04 with your instructions. The Clonezilla partition lost its boot capability but the files remained intact so I am able to run the makeboot command to toggle between booting Clonezilla or Ubuntu. This will become moot very soon, but it's still nice to know I can have separate partitions on the flash drive. Now the question is, how do you designate which of two bootable partitions are active? It would be nice to toggle a switch instead of having to go through a makeboot process.

Anyway, I tried booting from the Ubuntu partition on the flash drive and it booted, and looked like it was happy until... it died. The error message at reboot was as follows:

The system automatically powered off to maintain system temperature requirements. The air flow from the system fan vents may be obstructed...

I know my laptop runs hot, but I'm running from the hard disk right now, and if I reboot to the flash Ubuntu, its going to fail again because of temperature problems. I'm going to test it again right now.... It failed three times in a row, then miraculously I got to a command prompt and had to Google how to start the desktop with a "startx" command. Which failed to do anything but clear the screen. But at least it didn't say it was an unrecognized command.

Is it possible that version 10 has to run on a cooler machine than version 9? And how do I get to a gui if I ever get to the command prompt again? I'm in the home stretch here thanks to all of your help.

And how do I repartition my hard drive that is running the os and can't be unmounted? I'd really like to make a data partition and a sandbox for testing.

It looks like both Live Ubuntu and Clonezilla use the grub boot loader so theoretically you should be able to dual boot the flash drive. I could not tell you how to do that.

As to the Ubuntu 10.04 issues...

Recent Linux kernels (all, not just Ubuntu) have power usage issues. Here is a thread which has just started on the issue with links to some details. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ubuntu-923276/ Was to the immediate overheating caused by this - possibly but I would tend to think not.

The no gui issue sounds like an issue with the video driver vs. your video card. Here is a post in the Ubuntu forum to look at. Also follow the links in the post for some good info. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1475667

If you look here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Bugs/Lucidi8xxFreezes a few paragraphs down Try this and see what happens.

But the important thing is to get the heat issue under control so the machine will run long enough to do some more troubleshooting. Perhaps the heat sink needs to be dusted? I know my desktop PCs tend to accumulate a lot of dust over time and a shot of compressed air results in a cloud of dust and a cooler running machine.

Ken

I've had heat from dust buildup take down two laptops. The ultimate solution is to take the cpu heatsink and fan area apart and clean the radiator and fan and oil the motor shaft on the fan (sewing machine oil, not 3-in-1). The temp solution would be vacuuming with a crevice tool and then blowing through with compressed air. This may remove some dust, but it won't get a fan up to speed that's been slowed by oil loss and dust on the shaft.

The absolute master of grub and multiboot issues is Saikee at JustLinux Forums and a few others. Just google his name -- it's the first hit. Highly recommended.

I made some progress. The i915.modeset command worked to get me to a GUI. I actually used the flash drive Ubuntu to repartition my hard drive, with an ext3 partition where I plan to install v10.04. Everything was moving swimmingly until I tried to install from the desktop of the flash drive system. When I tried to launch the icon that says "Install Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS" nothing happened. When I tried to run the command from its properties "ubiquity --desktop %k gtk_ui" I got the following:

WARNING: Couldn't connect to system bus: Failed to connect to socket. /var/run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory

Now what?

How about booting from the flash drive and choosing Install rather than Try Ubuntu?

Ken

It takes me to a command prompt. I tried the ubiquity --desktop... command that runs from the desktop icon and got a "cannot open display" error

Sounds like Ubuntu and your video card do not like each other. Just a thought - try a different distro. Xubuntu (Ubuntu with the xfce interface) or Linux Mint might be worth a look. Both have live CD versions so you could try before you install.

Ken