Hey guys, I have a little experience with Fedore Core but am brand new to Ubuntu. I have an IBM Thinkpad T41 laptop running XP that I want to install Ubuntu on and dual-boot. Following an article at linuxdevcenter, here's the steps I followed:

1. Booted my laptop using a live Gentoo "system resuce CD" which includes qtparted.

2. Using qtparted I paritioned my drive like this: 2 NTFS partitions for Windows (they already existed - C: and D: drives), I added an ext3 partition for Ubuntu, a 2GB swap partition, and a a 10GB fat32 partition which will be shared between Windows and Ubuntu.

3. The partitioning went just fine, so I rebooted and installed Ubuntu. (version 6.x something...)

4. Installation went fine. It asked me if I wanted it to update the Master Boot Record so I could dual-boot. I said yes. Finally, I rebooted my laptop and sure enough - Grub ran and gave me the following choices: Ubuntu, Ubuntu recovery mode, and Windows XP. Yay! I first booted into Windows just to make sure it was working properly and it was. Yay again!

So far so good, but then I rebooted and tried booting into Ubuntu. About 5 seconds in, it hard-locked the laptop. On the screen, it said "Uncompressing Linux, OK. booting the kernel..."
It's right as this point that it freezes hard. Even if I try booting into the "Ubuntu - recovery mode" option it does the same thing.

So my questions are:

1. Any guesses as to why it's freezing? Hardware/driver incompatibility? This is a fairly common laptop with no "unusual hardware" in it.

2. I should probably wipe the Linux partition and try reinstalling, however, what about my Master Boot Record? How do I revert that back to the way it used to be?

Thanks in advance for any help, and sorry this was such a wordy post - but I wanted to make sure I was including as much info as possible.

To reinstall, you can just boot from the CD and then have it write to the MBR again. You don't have to wipe the MBR to start over....

One change you might make is to make small separate /boot partition. That way if you do ever want to just delete the linux partition, grub's config files are still there to boot Windows.

My guess would be hardware also. My only thought is to try booting with some options like noacpi. But I don't remember off the top of my head how to include those from the grub boot menu...

Hi!
Is backing up all your Xp data, wiping the entire drive and re-installing from scratch an option?

I know that in my experience (which is not extensive by any means) with resizing partitions on a working system, has the potential of causing alot of problems!

I use an external drive for all my important stuff for this very reason. I am always (just for kicks), formatting, reformatting, installing and re-installing, and I have NEVER had a problem dual-booting when installing onto a clean HD.

Just be sure to install Windows first, as old Billy G. isnt very friendly and doesnt like sharing his PC's with other OS's!

Good Luck!

Thanks for the reply, OK I'll go ahead and try re-installing - I'm not familiar with how the MBR works so I didn't know if it was OK to just start over.

If I was to just plain delete the Linux partition, what would happen to grub? Would it still be around prompting me to pick an OS? (would it realize ubuntu had been removed?)

It would probably be a last resort option. The laptop is my work laptop, and our IS dept. probably isn't too keen on my doing this anyway. If all else fails then maybe I'll try that.

My understanding of grub is that it essentially has two stages. Stage 1 lives in the MBR and that stage points grub to your /boot partition (where grub's config files are). Then once it reads those files, it loads stage 2. Stage 2 does the actual OS loading.

So if you make just a single linux partition where /boot lives inside "/", when you delete /, you also delete boot and grub can't load stage 2. So you wouldn't get any sort of menu. You might get a "grub>" prompt that you could enter the commands by hand to boot your OS, but I'm not sure of that.

So by creating a separate /boot partition, if you just decide to delete your linux one day, you would still get the grub menu and be able to boot windows. If you don't make a separate /boot, you'll have to boot with a windows disk and fdisk /mbr or fixmbr (I don't remember which one XP uses).

Well, still no luck. I tried deleting the linux partions I originally created using qtparted. This worked, although when I rebooted I got a Grub error and couldn't do anything. (except reboot into a system rescue CD and REINSTALL Ubuntu) When Ubuntu is installed, I at least get a Grub menu where I can choose between Ubuntu (which causes everything to freeze) or XP which works fine.

So, it seems as though I've painted myself in a corner - I need to have Ubuntu installed in order to even have boot choices, but I can't use Ubuntu at all.

So apparently Grub has installed itself - to some degree - in the MBR. If this isn't undoable then I may need to look at wiping the whole drive and starting over.

As I said, during the Ubuntu install, create a separate /boot partition and use that. Then you can delete Ubuntu and still use grub.

Definitely DO NOT wipe the whole drive!!!! As I said above, you just need to get a Windows boot disk and do fdisk /mbr if it's a Win95/98/ME boot disk or fixmbr if you use your XP install CD.

Ok, thanks - yes next time I will create a /boot partition for sure. I'm going to see if I can get ahold of a Windows install disc and try the fdisk/mbr thing. Thanks for the help!

If you can't find one, look on http://www.bootdisk.com/

Well after re-trying this multiple times after fixing my MBR (thanks pljvaldez, the fixmbr thing worked great!) I get the same problem each time: the laptop hard-locks immediately upon booting Ubuntu.

I must say I'm a little disappointed. I'm not running unusual or old hardware, it's a year-old IBM T41 laptop. I can successfully run Linux using Knoppix and Gentoo "live" CD's on this laptop. But Ubuntu freezes everything. Now maybe if I wiped the drive clean and started from scratch installing Ubuntu, rather than trying the dual-boot thing I'd have better success. But I don't *think* I'm doing anything wrong by trying to dual-boot.

If anyone has any final ideas to try I'm game, otherwise I think I'll give up on Ubuntu for the time being. Thanks to all who responded!

Try installing with the noacpi option (or is it acpi off). I can't remember the exact syntax to use. many times on an initial install the power management aspect (ACPI) of laptops gives problems. I installed Debian sarge on my laptop and had to use noacpi. Then I had to recompile a much newer kernel to make it work...

Is that a command-line thing? When I've been installing Ubuntu I've just been picking the "hard disk installation" from the main graphical menu. It's actually a nice install as it walks you through the steps nicely.

I've not installed the new Ubuntu, it used to have an ncurses based installer (the same one Debian uses) and had the boot: prompt at install time...

ahh, actually I think ubuntu has that too. I probably just hit enter when I saw it. So I should type noacpi at the boot: prompt and then hit enter?