GaretJax
February 20th, 2009, 07:14 AM
... unfortunately it didn't work :(
I know there are probably too many posts on dual-booting, but I took a direction that I hadn't seen before and I thought I'd share what not to do.
I bought a Dell Mini 9 with Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy) pre-installed. I installed XP SP3 in a small partition at the end of the hard drive for things like watching streaming Netflix and other small things. I want grub to be my primary boot loader but XP keeps hijacking it.
Here is what I did that didn't work. Dell Mini came pre-installed with Ubuntu. I booted off a flash drive with Gnome Parted and made a two NTFS partitions at the end of the disk.
Here is a picture of how my hard drive is now divided:
part0: Dell Utility
part1: Ubuntu (boot)
part2: NTFS drive to share data between OS's
part3: NTFS, XP SP3
I then moved the boot flag over to part3. Rebooted and installed XP on part3. After XP was installed I then went back into Gnome Parted and gave the boot flag back to part1 (Ubuntu) and modified Ubuntu's boot menu and added XP.
I was initially very happy because I tested this by booting into both XP and Ubuntu several times. Each time I booted into XP and rebooted, I was always brought back to the grub boot loader which is located on part1. It seemed that XP was going to play nice :D (yeah right!)
It turns out that XP will sometimes move the boot flag to its own partition after installing upates or making administrative changes to XP. Each time this happens I have to reboot into Gnome Parted to move the boot flag back to Ubuntu. Frustrating.
Most all the help I've seen tells me that I should install XP first then install Ubuntu but there is no way I am going to redo any installs.
So what is the easiest way to correct my situation? I know there is lots of documentation on how to dual-boot but I am not even sure what the recommended scenario is here.
Which partition should grub be on? How do I move it there? How can I be sure that XP won't hijack it anymore?
*** n00b alert ***
I pretty much know how to do anything in Windows but in Ubuntu I will essentially need (I hate to say it) some hand-holding.
Thanks in advance.
I know there are probably too many posts on dual-booting, but I took a direction that I hadn't seen before and I thought I'd share what not to do.
I bought a Dell Mini 9 with Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy) pre-installed. I installed XP SP3 in a small partition at the end of the hard drive for things like watching streaming Netflix and other small things. I want grub to be my primary boot loader but XP keeps hijacking it.
Here is what I did that didn't work. Dell Mini came pre-installed with Ubuntu. I booted off a flash drive with Gnome Parted and made a two NTFS partitions at the end of the disk.
Here is a picture of how my hard drive is now divided:
part0: Dell Utility
part1: Ubuntu (boot)
part2: NTFS drive to share data between OS's
part3: NTFS, XP SP3
I then moved the boot flag over to part3. Rebooted and installed XP on part3. After XP was installed I then went back into Gnome Parted and gave the boot flag back to part1 (Ubuntu) and modified Ubuntu's boot menu and added XP.
I was initially very happy because I tested this by booting into both XP and Ubuntu several times. Each time I booted into XP and rebooted, I was always brought back to the grub boot loader which is located on part1. It seemed that XP was going to play nice :D (yeah right!)
It turns out that XP will sometimes move the boot flag to its own partition after installing upates or making administrative changes to XP. Each time this happens I have to reboot into Gnome Parted to move the boot flag back to Ubuntu. Frustrating.
Most all the help I've seen tells me that I should install XP first then install Ubuntu but there is no way I am going to redo any installs.
So what is the easiest way to correct my situation? I know there is lots of documentation on how to dual-boot but I am not even sure what the recommended scenario is here.
Which partition should grub be on? How do I move it there? How can I be sure that XP won't hijack it anymore?
*** n00b alert ***
I pretty much know how to do anything in Windows but in Ubuntu I will essentially need (I hate to say it) some hand-holding.
Thanks in advance.