old pc dual boot ibm

[idiota]

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to set up ubuntu from the minimal CD, dual-booting with WinXP on a 5 year old IBM PC. I have one physical disk, 37GB, with 4GB for the IBM recovery partition and the rest for XP.

I defragged and used the GParted iso CD to shrink the WinXP partition to half its size, then rebooted and confirmed ******* was in good shape. Then I ran the minimal CD and told it to install to the largest available space. It set up swap and ext3 partitions, and GRUB, fine. WinXP remains good.

TWO PROBLEMS:

PROBLEM 1

F11 Recovery doesn't work - presumably because IBM have a custom MBR that Ubuntu has nuked. The IBM recovery partition IS visible in GRUB, and it boots into it ok - and then crashes. The display is:
"Setup is inspecting your hardward configuration"
"Press F6 if you want to install a SCSI or RAID 3rd party driver" (this works - so it HAS booted....)
"IBM Rescue and Recovery System" (blah)
"Please Wait"
Then blue screen STOP: c000021a The Session Manager Initialization process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0x000003a (0x00000000 - 0x000000000). I found in other forums via google that this is pretty much the utter death of ******* - people are talking about SAM password files, and the MS KB says winlogin or csrss has failed.

I'm sorry if this is off-topic (the issue is that IBM's recovery partition is actually another - drastically customised - XP install) but why did ubuntu mess with that partition? I told it to use biggest available space - and it did.

PROBLEM 2

Ubuntu gets past the splash screen animation, then displays PC DISPLAY SETTINGS CORRECT? (with no buttons or Y/N) and then doesn't react to the keyboard. After a few seconds it locks into a black screen. The power button powers things down nicely, so obviously ubuntu is running and I have a display settings issue with this ancient monitor. I tried the recovery mode - it all looks nice until I resume normal boot, then the same thing happens.

Could some kind person please point me to an article on configuring ubuntu for an old monitor from the command-line?

God bless y'all

[dandnsmith]

I'm sorry if this is off-topic (the issue is that IBM's recovery partition is actually another - drastically customised - XP install) but why did ubuntu mess with that partition? I told it to use biggest available space - and it did.

The messing was, almost certainly, installing the grub loader. Other machines (not necessarily IBM) have reported similar problems - once clobbered it seems to be a trifle tricky to get back.
Do you actually want to be able to use the recovery feature? as it oftens seems only to work if you retain the original partitioning.


PROBLEM 2

Ubuntu gets past the splash screen animation, then displays PC DISPLAY SETTINGS CORRECT? (with no buttons or Y/N) and then doesn't react to the keyboard. After a few seconds it locks into a black screen. The power button powers things down nicely, so obviously ubuntu is running and I have a display settings issue with this ancient monitor. I tried the recovery mode - it all looks nice until I resume normal boot, then the same thing happens.

I think you need to get to a terminal (from the CD, possibly) to try booting with 'safe' graphics. Have you tried a 'live CD' to see if the graphics work for that (one of my criteria for deciding whether to use a particular distro/release)