HP dv9000 Dual HD's Vista Ubuntu

[seanmjohnston]

I'm totally new to Linux/Ubuntu. I saw someone running it on a dell in class and immediately was impressed. A couple months ago I tried installing Ubuntu and ended up having to send my laptop to HP to get factory restored. Here is my setup.

Custom HP dv9000
Two 120GB HD's
2 GB RAM
Windows Vista Ultimate 64

One of the HD's I don't use at all, nothing is on it. I want to dual boot Ubuntu by installing it on this empty hard drive but have the ability to share files between Vista and Ubuntu. Where I ran into problems when I installed it was with GRUB. Ubuntu worked fine but when I tried to test out vista again all it would do is boot into the recovery partition of the Vista HD.

Can anyone please help me dual boot correctly? I'm by no means an expert but I am definitely not a beginner. Please help! Thank you!

[nzadLithium]

where did you install the boot loader to? It would probably be best if it was on your ubuntu hard disk, then you set your bios to boot that hard disk (That way you wouldn't touch vista at all ). Ubuntu should have recognised vista during the install, and you should have a boot option for vista in grub.

What exactly is happening when you boot vista normally?

[seanmjohnston]

where did you install the boot loader to? It would probably be best if it was on your ubuntu hard disk, then you set your bios to boot that hard disk (That way you wouldn't touch vista at all ). Ubuntu should have recognised vista during the install, and you should have a boot option for vista in grub.

What exactly is happening when you boot vista normally?

I installed Ubuntu from a CD I burned. After I installed ubuntu to the empty hard drive I would boot up my laptop and GRUB would show up as I expected. Ubuntu would work just fine but when I would select vista it would boot up only into the recovery partition of the HD that had vista on it. (HP laptops come with a partition on the OS HD that is for recovery)

[seanmjohnston]

where did you install the boot loader to? It would probably be best if it was on your ubuntu hard disk, then you set your bios to boot that hard disk (That way you wouldn't touch vista at all ). Ubuntu should have recognised vista during the install, and you should have a boot option for vista in grub.

What exactly is happening when you boot vista normally?

I think I kinda understand what your saying...so I should boot into the empty hard drive only and use my CD from there? Can you explain how I would go about doing that? Do I need to do anything to the empty hard drive first using Vista?

[nzadLithium]

Hmm, i'm thinking its possible that grub might be pointing to the wrong place? And thus starting your recovery partition instead of the windows bootloader?

boot ubuntu put this in a terminal
cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

copy and paste the output here. Hopefully we can get vista to start, as I take it you probably don't want to reinstall vista

[seanmjohnston]

Hmm, i'm thinking its possible that grub might be pointing to the wrong place? And thus starting your recovery partition instead of the windows bootloader?

boot ubuntu put this in a terminal
cat /boot/grub/menu.lst

copy and paste the output here. Hopefully we can get vista to start, as I take it you probably don't want to reinstall vista

Vista has already been factory restored. I have a clean slate and I want to get ubuntu installed correctly the first time so I don't have to send my laptop into HP again.

[nzadLithium]

ah ok then

do you still have the ubuntu partition on the second disk? To find out stick in the livecd boot it in livecd mode.
start a terminal
type fdisk -l

it should show both of your hard disks, one should be ntfs (probably with your recovery partition as well), while the other will most probably be ext3.

If you can still see an ext3 partition I think its safe to assume ubuntu is still on there

[seanmjohnston]

Both drives were wiped with killdisk and then factory restored so the ubuntu partition will not be there.

I was looking at this thread just now:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=512059

Can you explain to me what the following part means exactly?

NOTE: drives are 'sd??' because these laptops use SATA hard drives.
Recommended for Dual-booting on a laptop with 2 hard drives:

GRUB installed to MBR of sda1
sda1 - Windows
sdb1 - Ubuntu
sdb2 - Swap (Size of RAM, must not be less or hibernate will not work)

This is just what I would recommend for installation. If you have burned off the Recovery CD/DVD's feel free to delete the Quickplay and Recovery partitions. I never used either of them, so they were just wasted space for me. It is best to remove these partitions before installing Ubuntu, but you can remove their GRUB entries later by editing /boot/grub/menu.lst. This configuration also will allow you to reinstall Windows using the Recovery CD/DVD's with losing your Ubuntu installation. These CD/DVD's format your entire first hard drive which would wipe your Ubuntu install. There is no easy way to use the Windows bootloader to launch Ubuntu from different harddrive. I looked into this in case I wanted to remove Ubuntu later. It is probably possible, but it would be very complicated. Installing GRUB to the MBR of sda is your best and safest option.

[nzadLithium]

Just stick the ubuntu disk in now, you shouldn't need to do anything with vista since you have two hard drives, just tell it to install using an entire hard disk. (Make sure you don't pick the one with vista on it).

[seanmjohnston]

http://apcmag.com/how_to_dualboot_vi...rst.htm?page=1

Use that link to install, its probably more helpful
That previous post you were looking at was made for an older version of ubuntu which I don't think is supported anymore. Also the link I provided takes all the technical info out that you don't need to know

I looked at that link before but it doesn't explain how to do it with two HD's, just one. That is where I am shaky on.