9.10 Dual boot on Compaq laptop has killed vista.

[heyho]

After several months of my Father complaining that he is continually losing his wireless connection when using vista, I offered him the option of a decent operating system.

Having installed alongside windows of various flavours many times, I thought this would be no problem.

It has a 250gb HDD, of which vista has 180, and ubuntu 40. Vista is pratically empty anyway, as my Parents only surf and skype.

Vista appears in grub twice as normal, but when selected it gets to the green bar stage, then causes a complete restart, and we are back to grub again. This happens with normal startup and safemode. When a repair was offered, this also did not work.

I guess this is now a vista issue, but thought I would ask anyway. It would be nice to get this fixed, however if they get on with Ubuntu (and why wouldn't they?), I may start again and let it have the entire disk. Sorry I don't have any further details of the Hardware, although I am pretty sure it is a variant of a Compaq presario CQ-60.

[u_kmz]

i have exactly the same probelm with xp. after xp is selected in the grub and then xp boot windows, it crashes. It is also not possible to use the repair CD or even install a new XP version....When booting Ubuntu it is obvious that the data is still there, but somehow not accessible to the windoes world....does someone know what th eproblem might be?

[ajgreeny]

I have, or rather my wife has a Compaq CQ70, which probably is set up in a similar way to your CQ60.

The two versions of Vista are the OS and the Recovery partition, so the first thing to do is try booting to both of those; on my wife's machine they are both simply called Vista, with no differentiation between them, so it's trial and error.

If it does actually start booting the Vista OS, it can not be grub that is at fault, so you may need to restore the windows MBR using Supergrub CD, as I suspect you don't have a Vista Install CD or DVD. After that you can then repair windows as needed and restore grub again, hopefully so both systems can work if needed.

[u_kmz]

I alos think that tit is not grub, but as said before, now windows CD helps, not even installing a brand new XP. If trying to install or repair from CD, there is an error message (after all drivers are loaded) that chkdsk should be run.

[heyho]

Thanks for the replies.

I didn't think it was a grub problem, more likely windows throwing a fit because it can't find something. I also don't think repairing the MBR would help, as vista does try to start, then just dies.

I don't think that there was a vista disk with the laptop, I suspect there was/is a backup partition on the HDD. Maybe a good time to ditch vista completely.

It's quite comical that the factory shipped OS never worked properly, but a free one does.:)

[u_kmz]

nevertheless: the problem happened after UBUNTU was installed. XP ran perfectly before. So there's a problem which needs to be fixed. I hope somebodey finds a solution.

[ajgreeny]

How did you shrink the vista partition to make space for ubuntu? There have been cases of gparted causing big problems in vista when used to shrink it if anything other than sliding the right hand end of the partition to the right is carried out, making vista non-bootable.

For future reference, you should always shrink vista partitions with the vista disk-management utility, after a couple of defrags, preferably in safe mode, and with virtual memory disabled while defragging.

[heyho]

There have been cases of gparted causing big problems in vista

I used the live cd tool during the install as I have always done. I carried out an install on a very similar HP laptop a few months back with no problems.

The trouble is, you only look into these things after the event!

[Mark Phelps]

IF you're really interested in repairing Vista, you need to do the following:
1) Go to the NeoSmart Technology forums and search for Vista Recovery CD
2) Download the image -- following their directions
3) Burn the image to CD

You now have a Recovery CD

In the same forums, you will find tutorials and threads on how to repair Vista using that Recovery CD.

[presence1960]

IF you're really interested in repairing Vista, you need to do the following:
1) Go to the NeoSmart Technology forums and search for Vista Recovery CD
2) Download the image -- following their directions
3) Burn the image to CD

You now have a Recovery CD

In the same forums, you will find tutorials and threads on how to repair Vista using that Recovery CD.
+1 Mark

Here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1014708) are the instructions to follow- just use the instructions for Vista!

here is a link (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=379482) for the unresolved bug when resizing vista with anything other than it's disk management utility.

[heyho]

IF you're really interested in repairing Vista, you need to do the following:
1) Go to the NeoSmart Technology forums and search for Vista Recovery CD
2) Download the image -- following their directions
3) Burn the image to CD

You now have a Recovery CD

In the same forums, you will find tutorials and threads on how to repair Vista using that Recovery CD.

Thank you Mark, I will try that at the weekend when I have access to the laptop.