One of my sons asked this question when I was first installing Ubuntu on my notebook. I told him that I wanted it to work even better than it already did. Vista was working perfectly, but I wanted to have the choice of running Ubuntu.
I felt that the previous system was great. I had the dual boot working and both OS functioned well, but the disk partitioning issues had to be solved, so it is better to do it now before I start really using the computer. My first choice is still to repair the install that I already have so, I brought out the Super Grub Disk. It was a bit of a disappointment as I was not able to boot from it even though my system is configured to boot from CD/DVD. I will investigate this further.
So back to the Ubuntu install disk and this time I chose “Repair a broken system”.
It went through the configuration just fine, then it got to the partition management. I looked at the partitions and they were all correct looking. The one at the end is the extra swap partition that I converted to an ordinary drive before and the Free Geek volunteer had advised me to get the system working before I tried to merge it with the other, larger drive. I decided that the first problem was that I needed to make one the boot drive as they were all set to data drive. The system could not boot without a boot drive.
The next screen told me one of my problems, there was no root drive specified. I had changed it to \boot not \ . The boot designation is for the purpose of setting a separate partition for the boot mechanism only, said the help. It seems like a good idea if you had a desktop or mainframe with several different OS on it, then when you upgraded or re-installed, your boot system would still work. Not practical for me though, I am not advanced enough to make this work and once I get this system running, I will upgrade the Ubuntu to Hardy Heron, but not right away. I don’t think that will affect my boot system if it is an upgrade. I am of the opinion that an operating system has to mature before the software catches up to it. As a power user, I desire stability and reliable performance over nifty tricks. I do hear that Hardy is faster though …
I set the correct partition to the \ designation and I changed the large partition to my \home.
Not Yet. Back to the drawing board.
I was able to satisfy the system that I did want it to boot from the partition that has Ubuntu installed and I continued on to try booting.
I diagnose that it is a problem with designating the partition as \home. Perhaps if I go back and change it to an ordinary drive everything will work. The Grub bootloader is not the problem as Ubuntu tries to boot and Vista does boot. Vista still works perfectly, by the way, using the second entry on the Grub menu. My Free Geek helper and I decided that it is a specially formulated Asus Vista install and I will talk about it later — after I get this working.
I hope I can get this finished up soon. It is May already and I have so much work to do.
