Hi
Firstly - Are you saying you have no floppy drive? I did not understand from the post what was the problem there. The problem is that when you start the windows installation (you know when you pres the F6 bastard?) it automaticaly looks for the floppy drive. Later on when it is time to load the SATA drivers it will re-call the floppy drive. My way around this was to connect a USB floppy drive. Worked a charm. However, you might be able to do this with a USB memory pen. Not sure how but you might..... If it is possible just copy the conetnts of the floppy to the pen.
Second - Welcome to the sad club of dual-booting Ubuntu and XP......
Are they going to live on the same drive or on separate drives?
All my attempts to dual-boot the two using the SATA drive failed miserably. But then again I was using separate drives.
These are my findings. Please note that I could be talking straight out of my harris but that’s how it worked for me:
Ubuntu’s location has to be on the first drive preferably an IDE one. If you are using the same drive than the first primary partition.
However, if the first drive is SATA, Ubuntu is not happy…. Do not know why. For some reason it favours the IDE drives over the SATA… Maybe someone with proper understanding of Linux boot-loaders can shed a bit of light on this.
[ot]This is one major area where Mandriva beats Ubuntu, no sweat! But back to that later. [/ot]
That way when you install grub just hit ‘enter’ and off you go. Believe me I tried so many combinations, it hurts me to remember.
The drive will have to be partitioned before you start into two primary partitions. You could use the windows ‘partiotioner’ when you start the windows installation. Install Windows into the second primary partition (NTFS).
With windows which is prone to corruptions, you will be wise to have one Primary partition for the OS (I found 20GB more than enough – remember you need some space for programs….) and then either another primary or a logical partition for data. That way if something goes kuput you just reinstall windows on the 'system' partition, theoretically, without touching any data on the second partition.
If you want to save your self some hassle, work with two drives. One for Linux and one for Windows. It is literally like having two computers into one.
Where was I? I am writing from work and I get distracted all the time…. Don’t they know there are far better things?
Yes, Install Windows first so Ubuntu can find it and install grub to include your Windows installation.
My set-up is as follows:
1st drive – IDE (Master) with Ubuntu.
2nd Drive – IDE (Slave) with XP
3rd Drive – SATA data space for Ubuntu (formatted in RaiserFS and not accessible to Windows. That way the other users, who for some reason refuse to see Linux as an option, have a safe haven…).
I got to this set up after a number of combinations. To be fair, I never actually tried to install both on the same drive. Logically I think you are better to have them on separate drives. In case of hardware failure you always have one drive to work with.
It all changes with Mandriva! Mandriva has a kick ass GUI partitioner which even a noob like me can work. Now that is saying something.
You can put Mandriva on any drive you want and it just works (make sure you install the boot loader into the first drive or the computer will not know where to start from). This is one of the reasons I think I am going back to Mandriva for good. I was hopping between the two lately but weighing the pros and cons, I think I prefer Mandriva. This will be my future set-up
1st drive – SATA with Mandriva.
2nd Drive – IDE (Master) with XP.
3rd Drive – IDE (Slave) data space to service both installations.
That is unless I get an additional drive.
Hope this give you some idea on the different options…. Sorry to go on but unfortunately dual-booting Ubuntu and XP is not that straight forward… not when it includes SATA set-up….
Good luck
