Ubuntu With Vista
 

Hello. I recently did a triple boot system with windows xp, and windows vista on diffrent partitions on one hard drive, with mepis 6 on a secondary hard drive. The mepis boot loader has windows listed, which takes me to the vista boot loader. My question is: can i wipe mepis off the second drive and install ubuntu?, and will ubuntus boot loader ( which would overwrite mepis' loader )see the vista boot loader?. The reason I ask is because i put a bit of work into xp and vista getting them set up, and i dont want to have to completely wipe both drives. I once dual-booted xp and ubuntu with little trouble, so I'm hoping that all i have to do is wipe mepis off the other drive, and install ubuntu.

If Mepis uses GRUB as it's bootloader, like Ubuntu does (I could think so), you can copy Mepis' bootloader configuration before overwriting it, and compare that to the Ubuntu bootloader config after the setup if Windows' arent' added to the list automatically (they should be; every time I've done dual-boot -- never tried triple boot, but it shouldn't make any difference -- Ubuntu has correctly added Windows installs to the boot list). The file you need to copy (as root) is /boot/grub/menu.lst if you're using GRUB Legacy as you probably are, and after you've installed Ubuntu just compare that file with the Ubuntu's same file if needed. I think, though, that it's not necessary; I'm confident Ubuntu recognizes Vista (because the boot section for Vista is probably just the same as for XP and all the others, but just with a different partition of course). So in my opinion you can safely go on installing Ubuntu; if you like, take a copy of GRUB's config file. The same goes naturally for LILO if Mepis used that as it's bootloader, but the file would then be /etc/lilo.conf and after altering (if you alter) LILO config file you must re-run LILO for the changes to take effect.

If Mepis uses GRUB, copying and then comparing the config file is easier. Anyway it's not needed if I'm right.

Thank You
 

I did the ubuntu install last night. Everything went flawlessly, for once. Thank you for your reply.