I have installed unbuntu on a spare hard drive & then connected my vista hard drive up so I had to go into the bios & choose which hard drive to boot from.

This method worked great for a few days & I was really enjoying linux but not the linux hard drive made funny noises & says it can't boot.

Could someone in the know please point me to a simple "how to" on installing it on a spare hard drive doing it a more suitable way to my basic way?


Or my other option was:

when I inseted ubuntu with just my vista drive in it gave me the option of making a partition & having say 75% vista 25% linux.

If I had of continued installing in this way would this be a safe way of using the 2 operating systems together?

I'd say it's better to have them both on the same drive and use a boot loader. (Ubuntu uses GRUB.)

Besides, having to load your BIOS ever time is a pain in the neck.

As far as the weird noise, maybe you corrupted the MRB on the Ubuntu drive? It's not unheard of, especially with constantly flip-flopping like that.

In any case, if your drive is big enough, I'd just put them on both. Just make sure you install vista first and leave enough empty space when formatting the drive.

To install it on a seperate drive you just need to select that drive to install to. There's no need to remove the Vista drive, as it should be detected and GRUB/LILO configured so you can access it.

It would be better to first defrag the Vista partition and use Vista to resize the drive before installing Linux.
If you want you can follow the instructions for using the NTldr to boot linux. Vista doesn't have a BOOT.INI file but if you create
one, it will be used. This will allow you to install linux without touching the MBR of the main drive.

I have just formatted my HD so a defrag isnt really needed but to make it textbook I will do it...
Where do I go to make the partition in vista & will 25 gig be enough for linux?

25GB is way more than enough for any modern Linux distribution.

Huh. I thought there was one. I've only used vista for about total of five minutes, but I thought I remember seeing one in the root directory.

Nope. He's right--BOOT.ini is no longer present in Vista. Hooray for more quirks for the poor Windows admins out there.

Something I became recently fond of while introducing a friend to Linux is Wubi.

Technically not dual-booting, but it's better than a Live CD and it's extremely easy...almost easier than the Live CD!

I'm not sure what your level of experience is, how much you want to learn, or what you plan on doing, but if:

A) You have a low level of experience (not to be confused with low-level experience)
B) You don't want or need to learn much about Ubuntu or Linux
C) You just want to try Ubuntu OR
D) You just want to use Ubuntu for business/office reasons (word processing, e-mail, IM, etc)

I would suggest Wubi if you meet three of the above.

when I installed Linux on my new laptop, Vista was very greedy on how much space it would spare. I think my mistake was in not defragging the drive first. Vista will relocate files to the beginning and middle of the drive. The reason to defrag the drive is to relocate files near the end of the drive rather than to reduce fragmenting. I forgot to defrag the drive (my Vista laptop wasn't used that much either) and when Vista didn't reduce the size of the partition enough, I used gparted. I ended up having to repair the filesystems in both Vista and Linux.

I don't remember the exact locate of the program. It is a plugin loaded from the system administration window. In XP, you could create partitions on a new drive. In Vista, you can adjust a partitions size.

Thanx guys,

Just an update, it's installed & still working a treat...

Sounds great! Let us know how things go!

is there a way of getting a decent font?
they are all squashed up (tall but narrow letters) no matter which I choose, they seem fine in vista so I know it's not the monitor?

No idea Guys?