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View Full Version : [ubuntu] Salvaging old docs before ditching XP from a non booting XP pro



taronski
January 19th, 2009, 08:49 PM
Good evening All,

Last week I started the procedure of "migrating" to ubuntu via Live, all was going well so I tried to "parallel" install ubuntu next to XP SP3 (from Live). And that when things started to go wrong, Ubuntu installer came back with not enough space on the drive (although the RAID array (2 x 200G) had enough space on it).

Then XP didn't boot anymore (not on its own nor with CD), run chkdsk /f and I got serious error message etc.

From Live I also get a NTFS error message on SDB which I don't know how to fix (since CHKDSK /f didnt fix it).

As far as I can tell Ubuntu is not installed on any partition (as I can not see it from the partitioning application) all that i can see is an unspecified partition taking 190G (of which 75G free) + 10MB unallocated on SDA and 190 unallocated on SDB.

At this point I am not even sure if XP is still installed (since I would have expected a reference to windows to come out in paritioning).

So what I (think I) want to do is to go ahead with Ubuntu. Ideally I would like to ring fence my data files in a safe directory on one of the 2 HD which won't get touched by the install of ubuntu (i can still see them via Live CD Ubuntu) then install Ubuntu and then install XP as a virtual OS inside ubuntu (for the very few apps that arent available on ubuntu). If I can not ringfence the old files I am also OK to lose them since I have most of them backed on a NAS.

Does it sound like a sensible approach?
Are there better approaches?
Would it get rid of any (SW) errors on the disk?
Would ubuntu reformat the disks to FAT 32?
Is there a reference guide on the various steps for something similar to the above migration?

Thanks a lot in advance and sorry for any confusion in the email but this thing has driven me nuts in the last 4 days.

Ciao

Taronski