Vista is now booting from the grub bootloader and is working perfectly while completely ignoring all Ubuntu on the partitioned drive. It has enough space, and I will be able to practice on it as I know I will get some Vista support calls.
Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 works wonderfully on my notebook as the default OS. I still have a few issues to solve but the forum support has been very helpful. I was worried that my Nvidia card would be tricky to install, but it seems to be working fine and I set up Alsa for audio now.
I have to clean up the failed install and reclaim my home partition. There is also some space that is not being used by either OS.
I installed a home partition because I read that all your personal data, including application preferences would be saved there and then I could upgrade without loosing my personal computer. My problem now is that the partitions were made during the failed install, so now I have to reclaim of remove them.
The hard drive listing before I removed the swap drive [matches above gparted screenshot]:
Here is a screenshot of the present drive situation with the end swap drive deleted.
Note the new 570.9 MB volume that was formerly the swap drive. With this configuration both OS run, but my Ubuntu drive is fragmented and I can’t use most of it. I will try to fix it, but I will be cautious so I don’t loose the set-up I have — I hope.
I am researching Firewire audio for this notebook and I am trying to get my M-Audio Delta 44 card to work on my desktop. This all seems like so much work when I have to try to meet the publishing deadline for my book. I know it will be worth it to have a mobile Ubuntu recording system. I am trying not to buy another mac. I loved my mac, but I couldn’t afford it. It was so expensive to buy that I couldn’t afford software. The studio I work for bought the software for me to use, but I ended up realizing that the best option was to sell them the hardware too. I need to have a notebook that I can take on my tour and that one was purposely configured for the studio environment.
I know that I can pirate anything I need — but I won’t. I am an advanced user and I should not have to steal the tools of my trade. Ubuntu is giving me those tools and I hope to use them to the complete every aspect of my project except the music notation. I am doing that on the aforementioned mac in the studio using Finale. All of the book design is planned using The Gimp and Scribus and I hope to be able to do some of the audio too. I am exploring starting with the desktop until I get firewire. I have not yet found a Final Cut Pro for Ubuntu, but maybe somewhere in a repository far, far away …