XP Ubuntu 7.04 dual boot problems and steps taken thus far
 

Hello everyone,

Recently, I've been attempting to dual boot XP Pro and Ubuntu 7.04, following various tutorials and asking questions in ubuntuforums.org that have not yet been successful. I have two hard drives that are internal. The Master on this system is a 250 GB IDE drive, and the Slave is a 200 GB SCSI drive. There is one gig of RAM, and a 64 bit AMD Athlon processor. There is no floppy drive.

I've tried the following steps in an attempt to have a working Ubuntu and XP:

1. XP Master Drive, Ubuntu Slave Drive, no other configuration - this was done by selecting use entire slave drive in the install dialogue.
a. Resulted in having to format the master drive due to Windows not booting.
2. Unplug XP drive, install Ubuntu on slave drive, using entire drive, replug Ubuntu slave drive.
a. Resulted in having to format the master drive due to Windows not booting.
3. XP Master Drive, Ubuntu Slave Drive using entire drive, instructing Ubuntu to put GRUB onto the master drive.
a. Resulted in having to format the master drive due to Windows not booting.
4. Partition master drive with first partition NTFS and XP, second partition Fat32 and Ubuntu, use slave drive for storage.
a. Resulted in having to format the master drive due to Windows not booting.
5. Install XP on the master drive first partition, leaving ~10 gigs of unpartitioned space. Then, using the Ubuntu manual partition to create the / partition at 8 gigs, the swap partition at 1 gig, and the /home partition set to use the entirety of the slave drive.
a. After the install process, Ubuntu did not ask me to reboot my system, and when I rebooted it myself it gave several errors in a list, and stopped shutting down. Windows did successfully boot after this, but when I booted from the GRUB CD, it did not find an Ubuntu installation.
b. This is the current state of my hard drive. The master has Windows on it with ~10 gigs of unpartitioned space. The slave drive is empty. Windows does not recognize it, which I'm assuming means that the Linux install did format it as FAT32.

As noted, several attempts have resulted in Windows being unable to boot. I suspect at least some of it has been due to Ubuntu being unable to boot, as well, but I can't verify that. Fixmbr has never worked, bootcfg has never worked, and the GRUB CD hasn't worked. Formatting both drives again and reinstalling Windows has been the only thing thus far that has resulted in a boot of anything.

With the GBUB CD, I've tried all the various options that are under GNU/Linux in an attempt to boot Ubuntu after it has been installed. GRUB typically does recognize that Ubuntu is present, but it is always unable to boot it or create the MBR.

When running the Ubuntu installer, it once gave me an error related to creating the user, and then it appeared to continue installing, but didn't work. Other times, it has gone through the install process, and then appeared to finish. It didn't ask me to reboot, though.

Does anyone have recommendations for something that can help, and that can hopefully avoid having to format the working Windows drive again? I've run the Ubuntu CD through the disk checker on the startup screen, and it apparently doesn't have any errors.

Oh, I don't have a floppy drive at this time, if that's relevant at all. Currently, I have once again reinstalled Windows on the Master drive. I wouldn't be terribly against reformatting the Master if necessary, as I haven't reinstalled all my backups yet. I do have backups, though, of important data.

Thank you for any help!

Jon Stegall

Pick any config that you're happy with - personally I'd give Ubuntu the second drive, and let it install grub to the MBR.
The non-boot of Windoze is not really a problem - should be easy to fix without a reformat/re-install.
When you get Ubuntu installed again, post the (entire) output of these two commands from a terminal windowYou'll need your password for the first command.

I haven't been able to get Ubuntu successfully installed yet. Thus far, Ubuntu has only run from the Live Disk. After I've tried to install it, I can see it from GRUB, but it doesn't ever boot. It will give an "Error loading operating system" message if there is no CD present in the drive.

Thoughts?

Thanks for the reply.

Jon

If you feel like doing the install again, let's see the output from the first command done from the liveCD - also "df -hT", also from the liveCD - will help us to find the menu.lst.

You're going to wear out the drive with all that unnecessary reformatting. LOL

Boot the LiveCD and once it's up access the drive with Ubuntu installed and post the contents of /boot/grub/menu.lst

It's probably something really simple that can be fixed with a quick edit.

Well. I thought I would download the install CD again, in the hopes that maybe that might have been the problem thus far. So after that's finished, the consensus seems to be that I can:

1. go through the install process, choosing to install Ubuntu to the slave SCSI drive (this was my original hope).

2. assuming that I am unable to boot into Ubuntu, boot from the LiveCD and once it's up access the slave drive where Ubuntu is installed and post the contents of /boot/grub/menu.lst

Any other precautionary steps I might try? Thanks for your help, thus far. I'm looking forward to hopefully getting this working, this time.

Jon

Yeah, or could just do what I suggested and possibly save yourself the extra work.

So apparently, I have achieved victory! I finally decided that it might be worth trying the Ubuntu Server install, instead of the desktop install. As I've read, I can install a GUI for it myself after the OS is running. I have done this, and Windows still boots, and Ubuntu boots, and as I type the system is installing GNOME. I could not be more relieved. Thank you for the advice; I wouldn't have dared to allow Ubuntu to write itself to the MBR were it not for the encouragement that my previous woes might not have been as bad as I thought they were.

So in any case, I'm very happy. Thanks again.
Jon