Dual boot to Ubuntu and Win XP

[Bopher]

Ok, I think my first mistake was not coming here and posting for more info. I have my Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop that I want to boot both Windows XP and Ubuntu so I can play around with the Linux system and start looking into that for a server some day in the far far away future.

Well here's what I have so far:
4 partitions, What was suggested in the Ubuntu forums.
C: is Windows XP formatted NTFS this one is 20gig
D: will be the main drive for Ubuntu, I set the size to I believe I set this at 6gig
E: will be the swap partition, this one is set to 1 or 2 gig I think.
F: FAT32 formatted for sharing files between the two. mostly music and movies. this one is at 10gig

Now I already formatted and installed Windows XP onto the C:. F: is formatted in FAT32 to share file in between.
I pulled the CD Burner from my desktop and placed my DVDROM in there and only have 1 IDE connection on the MB so I can't burn a boot disk. I read through the instructions on the forums to setup and boot from a USB Stick but for some reason my laptop doesn't see the boot files on the USB it goes right over and boots from the C:.
I call out to the Linux Masters of the site and enlighten me on how to proceed.

[.Maleficus.]

C: - Good
D: - 6GB... might be a little small. You might consider just making a /swap and ext3 partition, and using the NTFS-3G driver to read the Linux drives. That way you won't have to worry about running out of space on your /root partition.
E: - You won't even see it. Also, you probably don't even need more than 1GB.
F: - Again, I'd use the NTFS-3G driver to read the drive and skip that partition.

Does you laptop even have the ability to boot from USB? You'll need to set the BIOS to do so if it can. You could do a network install, but I think grabbing the CD burner and using that for a day might be easier...

Not to pimp myself, but you might want to read Linux in a Nutshell (in my sig). It goes through the Ubuntu installer, and covers drive making and all that good stuff. It talks about a boot partition, but I wouldn't worry about that in your case (unless Ubuntu is going to be your main OS).

[Bopher]

My laptop has the option in the BIOS for booting from USB. If I have my USB Stick in the slot then it boots past to WIN XP, but if have my iPod plugged in then it stops at the Dell bootup screen. So should I boot up from the Win XP Disk again and combine the E: and the F:? Also what is the NTFS-3G? driver? Is that on the windows disk or the Ubuntu disk?

[Luke122]

Your usb stick needs to be formatted as bootable, not just have the files copied onto it.

http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm

[.Maleficus.]

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/01/25/usb-x-ubuntu-610/

Nice little tut.

Also, the NTFS-3G driver is for Windows and Linux, so you can read the NTFS drive from Linux, and the Linux drive from Windows.

[Bopher]

So I gave up on booting from a USB stick. Even formatting it and setting it up as a boot disk failed. The computer just went right by and booted to XP. SO I found a CDR and burned the Ubuntu 7.10 to it from the internet download.
Everything seemed to boot fine. Took some time but it finally got in to Ubuntu desktop. I double clicked install and answered all the questions it ask. I was doing ok till I got to the partitioning and installing. I selected what I thought was the right drive under the manual option in the partition. Set the first drive as ext2? if thats right and set the boot to as /. then I selected the next drive which is already partitioned to 1gig as swap. Now I think these are correct please correct me if wrong.
so it goes and starts to install and give me a file copy error at about 18%. So I try again.. Call me a glutton for punishment. Questions, partition info, here I selected the first option and told it to install that way. I think it repartioned the C: instead of the D: and now I can't boot to Windows. Looks like I'll be doing some work after work tomorrow.
Any info is good info to me. I've been using Windows since 3.1 and am pretty used to point click and go and it does everything for you, you just tell it where. I'm in the dark on the sda and all that. But I wish to learn!! I'll read through the tut .Maleficus. has a few more times and see where I'm messing up.

[Drum Thumper]

So I gave up on booting from a USB stick. Even formatting it and setting it up as a boot disk failed. The computer just went right by and booted to XP. SO I found a CDR and burned the Ubuntu 7.10 to it from the internet download.
Everything seemed to boot fine. Took some time but it finally got in to Ubuntu desktop. I double clicked install and answered all the questions it ask. I was doing ok till I got to the partitioning and installing. I selected what I thought was the right drive under the manual option in the partition. Set the first drive as ext2? if thats right and set the boot to as /. then I selected the next drive which is already partitioned to 1gig as swap. Now I think these are correct please correct me if wrong.
so it goes and starts to install and give me a file copy error at about 18%. So I try again.. Call me a glutton for punishment. Questions, partition info, here I selected the first option and told it to install that way. I think it repartioned the C: instead of the D: and now I can't boot to Windows. Looks like I'll be doing some work after work tomorrow.
Any info is good info to me. I've been using Windows since 3.1 and am pretty used to point click and go and it does everything for you, you just tell it where. I'm in the dark on the sda and all that. But I wish to learn!! I'll read through the tut .Maleficus. has a few more times and see where I'm messing up.

You have to go in and set your BIOS to boot from USB. On a Dell, I *think* you have to know the super secret keystroke combination to enter this part of the BIOS. I've never really worked on a Dell, so I'm not 100% sure. Simply plugging it in will not do anything if your BIOS doesn't tell the computer to look at the thumbdrive as the first bootable drive.

I've seen that file copy error as well, although it was doing that to me on a fresh install. TBH, I swapped hard drive out, problem solved. Somehow, I don't think that's going to work for you. .Mal can answer this much better than I can.

[.Maleficus.]

I just installed Ubuntu yesterday (using the Alternate install CD but that doesn't really make a difference). Here's my partitions.

/dev/sda1 - Windows, NTFS, Bootable
/dev/sda2 - Linux boot partition, ext2, 32MB, Bootable
/dev/sda3 - Linux swap, 1GB
/dev/sda4 - Linux /, ext3, 50GB

What happens when you try to boot Windows? Do you get to GRUB (Linux bootloader)? Or just nothing? You might want to pop in your Windows install CD and run fixmbr or whatever it's called for repairing the MBR (had to do that yesterday too..). See what it does, and see if you can boot Windows. If not, then you might have borked it :(. Try a Repair install of if you can't boot by fixing the MBR, and if that fails, then you might have to reformat.

[Bopher]

Ok, so the sdas are numbered 1-whatever and they are basically, C:, D:, E:, F: when I'm looking at the drive setup in Windows.
I see that there are 3 linux drives setup on your dealo there. Should I really have 1 windows, 1 linux boot at 32 like you have, the swap and the root boot, then my media drive?

[.Maleficus.]

Ok, so the sdas are numbered 1-whatever and they are basically, C:, D:, E:, F: when I'm looking at the drive setup in Windows.
I see that there are 3 linux drives setup on your dealo there. Should I really have 1 windows, 1 linux boot at 32 like you have, the swap and the root boot, then my media drive?
No, you won't be able to do that. You can only have 4 Primary partitions. Skip the /boot partition, and make the media one instead. Format it as FAT32. Just have the / drive be the /boot and / drive.

[Bopher]

Ok, i see. I think I also figured out what went wrong last night. For some reason I got all my sdas mixed around. When I repartioned for Windows again I had like 6 drives. This time I only partitioned for XP (10gig) and left the rest alone. Then I let Ubuntu partition more of the drive for itself and I'll partition and format the media area after. I pulled the drive and placed it in my desktop, ran the live cd and got Ubuntu to install to the drive. So either my drive is going bad on the laptop or, I need to get a cleaning disk. for now I'm happy that the CD burned good.

[.Maleficus.]

Glad to hear you're getting some of it sorted out. I myself am in a little bit of a tight spot getting my wireless to work :dead:. Good ol' ndiswrapper. Too bad I'm getting an average of 223 b/s.

I've tried all the commands like "faster wireless = very yes" but nothing seems to be working!


:D

Hopefully I'll get it figured out soon. Ubuntu won't be getting much use if I can't even install packages, let alone go on TBCS.

[Bopher]

I hear you on that. But thats one reason I was going dual boot because I do stuff for work on my laptop and I don't know how it will act seems it need that microsoft .net program to run and constant internet access. My CDROM seems like its on its last legs. The last time I ran the XP install to fix the partitions it couldn't find the disk when it started the reinstall.

[.Maleficus.]

Well, I read on the Ubuntu Forums that the wireless card I have worked out-of-the-box with 7.04, and then just all of a sudden didn't with 7.10. Since I don't even have anything installed yet, I might just revert to 7.04 if I can find an installer. If I could jump back from the command line within Ubuntu, I would, but I don't think you can do that.

"sudo apt-get downgrade". Doesn't sound like something they'd want people using.


Edit: Well, I'm downloading the install CD. I hope this one works good, because so far 7.10 hasn't been that nice to my system. Power Management likes to turn my monitor off during boot, and it doesn't like to remember that I added ndiswrapper to the auto-loaded modules.