Hello to you all, & I hope you can solve my simple problem !!!

I have a SONY VGN SZ1M/B ( 1 MB of RAM)........ in which I had trouble with the XP Home edition.......it just slowed down , jammed up, “......not responding”, etc.
Now, the technician said it may have something to do with the “scheda grafica” ( I live in italy and have an italian XP OS) , but I have been told that if LINUX (XUBUNTU) works then so should XP.
But he failed to “recover” the XP OS (which is on the HD and not on a CD) and said that once “recovered”, the same problems showed up ( iwas not there so did not see).

The suggestion was made, and accepted, to install XUBUNTU, with which I am VERY happy! (as it is in english!!!)
NOW, the recovery program is still on the HD and I would like to try to reinstall the XP OS but without loosing the XUBUNTU system ( I do not want to reinstall it!)
When I “esc” on booting up I can see the “VAYO Recovery Tool”,under the title of “other operating systems”, and when I execute this it does give me the starting process in which it says to back up my data as the process will not perform backups. At this point I opted out and have now backed up all my data onto CDs and only XUBUNTU & the Recovery Tool are on the HD.
Why do I want to reinstall the XP OS you are asking? ....,well, I do some drawing with AutoCAD and there is no comparable program on the LINUX system........unless you can point me in the right direction, so I would use the XP only for that.

So, what do I do....below is a what “fdisk -l” gives:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk identifier: 0xdf906cc2



Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sda1 1 912 7325608+ 12 Compaq diagnostics

/dev/sda2 * 913 5710 38539935 83 Linux

/dev/sda3 5777 9729 31752472+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)

/dev/sda4 5711 5776 530145 82 Linux swap / Solaris

/dev/sda5 5777 9729 31752441 7 HPFS/NTFS


please email me with your suggestions (if its more convenient and easier to explain), it would be greatly appreciated.

I'm sure if you googled autocad linux you'll come up with several results. Stick with linux, it has tons of free software. Plus, the more you use it, the more competent you'd be. There are less viruses out there for linux. Linux just rocks. Also, if absolutely couldn't find an autocad program for linux, which I doubt cause I googled autocad linux and found tons of stuff, you could always try installing the windows xp autocad software on linux using wine. Pop in the cd, and on the executable right click it, and open it using wine. Google wine, windows emulator, for more info.

Thing is, if you wanted xp back then when you reinstalled xp on sda5, the mbr would be overwritten and you wouldn't be able to access the xubuntu anymore.

The way it should be done is, reformat your hard disk completely, install windows xp, then install xubuntu, that way you can double boot and have an option to choose which OS you want to start at bootup.

I don't have much experience with installing xp from a recovery partition, but I have a feeling it cannot be done, unless the xp partition, I'm guessing sda5 is still intact. But if you tried using the recovery partition to repair xp and that didn't work, then you'd have to fully reinstall xp and the only way to do that is to pay $90 bucks at newegg.com for a OEM winxp home edition cd.

trist007 is correct in everything he said.

There is a way that you might be able to install from the recovery partition and still be able to boot windows or Xubuntu though. The recovery partition will do 1 of 2 things if it works. It will either install windows on the partition you want it on and overwrite the MBR, or it will repartition the entire drive and you will lose Xubuntu. In the second case, just re-install xubuntu and you won't have the MBR problem.

In the first case, you would need a way to install grub on the MBR. This can be done using a grub boot disk which would create a live environment in which you can set up grub to boot windows or xubuntu and install it on the MBR. You can google that for more info.

thanks trist007 & digirat1838, your help is really what i wanted to hear. i will google and see what i can do about an autocad program.
i agree Linux is great.thanks again and best wishes

Your xp is on a logical partition and windows doesn't boot well from logical partitions and if it does, it's a lot trickier to accomplish. The simplest way to use windows is to have it on a primary. If you have it on a logical you usually need another windows version on a primary. Info on booting windows from a logical is available at the support.microsoft site