laluckaryves

Hey guys i'm having trouble setting up a dual boot with vista and ubuntu 7.10. I have two hard drives: 320gb for extra storage (drive 0) and 320gb with windows (drive 1). I partitioned the drive with windows and shrunk the main volume by 12gb to make room for linux. Then i booted from the live cd and went through the install process. I start getting unsure when it comes to partitioning... i chose the manual option and then split the unallocated space into two new partitions: 10gb root partition ("/") and a 2gb swap partition. Then skipping to the end of the install there is an advanced tab which determines where GRUB is installed. On that same page it reads something like:

sdb:
partition #3: ext3 (root partition im assuming)
partition #5: swap file

In the advanced tab i changed it from the default value of (hd0) to (hd1,2) because i'm installing linux on my second hard drive and the root file is in the third partition.
After the installation is comlplete it says to reboot but when i do it goes straight into windows vista without any GRUB menu or way to decide which OS to boot. Where did i go wrong? Any help would be great! thanks

Donnie Darko

Huh.

Well I'm not so sure about the partitions. I think you've got too many and that makes things confusing.

Second, I don't think that 12 Gbytes is enough. I would have done at least 20.

But I don't think either of them is your problem.

My guess is that Ubuntu thought it was installing on your boot drive when you selected a drive/partition other than the default.

I bet if you change the boot order to the drive Ubuntu is installed on, you will get the Grub.

Also, it sort of sounds like you pre-paritioned the drive before Ubuntu install. Did you ? If so, how many ? It sounded like 3 or so.

Ubuntu makes it's own partitions, so I am wondering if you have like 6 of them or what ?

Also I'm not sure when the data drive is "0" and the boot drive is "1". That sounds bass-ackwards also. Does this mean you have your primary boot drive as "D:\" in Windows. If so, that's a MESS. I happened to me once on accident and it was a huge mess.

I think the simplest would have been best. In Vista, create ONE partition of 20 Gbytes or more on your BOOT drive, and then boot Ubuntu and install to that partition. Simple. Easy.

Let your data drive be your data drive. With a 350 Gbyte drive you can afford 20 Gbytes and I can see no reason to have anything more complicated than this.

laluckaryves

i know it seems weird but my boot drive is c:\ however in both ubuntu and windows it says that it is drive 1 while the extra storage d:\ is drive 0. And i did create one partition of 12gb on my boot drive and then made that one partition into two partitions in ubuntu (root and swap). i appreciate the help and i hope this clears things up. thanks.

DigMe

Nice avatar...love those videos.

bc

The Hundred Gunner

Too bad this thread is ages old.

12GB should absolutely be plenty for Ubuntu.

I think what you want to do is install the GRUB boot loader to the HDD it's on (both your windows and Ubuntu installs.) I believe the partition you install it to shouldn't matter since the bootloader gets written to the "MBR," the master boot record, right? So you just select the drive and not a partition.

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