Problems Dual booting Vista/Ubuntu 8.04


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I have a HP Pavillion 9700 laptop with two SATA drives, a 120 GB "C" drive with Vista Ultimate installed and a unformatted 320 GB drive.

To make this easy, I pulled out the "C" drive since I cannot disable it in the BIOS. I then installed Ubuntu to that 320 GB, but only 100 GB of it. (I did this because I wanted to keep the Vista bootloader). Anyhow, I chose the manual partition, assigned 100 GB and set the mount point to "/". I did not install a swap partition as I've got 3 GB of RAM. After installing and upon a reboot, I'm getting an error of operating system not found. If I put the primary disk in, I can boot to Vista. I then use BCDEdit to tell the Windows Bootloader that Linux is installed on the second hard drive, but when I try to boot to it, I get an error that the OS is not there.

Any ideas or suggestions?

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Well, when you installed Ubuntu with the missing "normal" boot drive, GRUB rightfully saw your Linux drive as the first drive, so set itself up that way. Then when you added in the Vista drive, it buggered it all up. :p

Put the drives all in. Re-install Ubuntu. I don't know about using Vista's boot loader, or how to add Ubuntu to it. But if you install GRUB, it will set up your Ubuntu/Vista dual booting.

If you want manual install and customizing your Vista boot loader, I am sure someone else here has experience or advice on that.

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Well, when you installed Ubuntu with the missing "normal" boot drive, GRUB rightfully saw your Linux drive as the first drive, so set itself up that way. Then when you added in the Vista drive, it buggered it all up. :p

Put the drives all in. Re-install Ubuntu. I don't know about using Vista's boot loader, or how to add Ubuntu to it. But if you install GRUB, it will set up your Ubuntu/Vista dual booting.

If you want manual install and customizing your Vista boot loader, I am sure someone else here has experience or advice on that.

But that's the thing. I did not add the first drive in when I rebooted initially to finish the install. It still came up as OS not found. I'm wondering if there is some sort of item locked down in HP that requires the first hard drive to be present, period. Thanks HP! ;)

I'll try with the first drive in, but I would prefer to have Vista's bootloader in case something gets corrupted with Grub.

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There was a procedure to use XP's boot.ini/NTLDR system to dual boot XP and Linux without changing the MBR. I tested it and it worked just fine, but I think that Vista is a whole other game. :ermm: I don't know anything about their BCE system (or whatever it is called).

Sorry. :(

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No problem. :) I'll bite the bullet and just try installing it to the second drive with the first one in. Like I said, it's probably something that HP locked down when it comes to booting.

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  • 2 months later...
I have a HP Pavillion 9700 laptop with two SATA drives, a 120 GB "C" drive with Vista Ultimate installed and a unformatted 320 GB drive.

To make this easy, I pulled out the "C" drive since I cannot disable it in the BIOS. I then installed Ubuntu to that 320 GB, but only 100 GB of it. (I did this because I wanted to keep the Vista bootloader). Anyhow, I chose the manual partition, assigned 100 GB and set the mount point to "/". I did not install a swap partition as I've got 3 GB of RAM. After installing and upon a reboot, I'm getting an error of operating system not found. If I put the primary disk in, I can boot to Vista. I then use BCDEdit to tell the Windows Bootloader that Linux is installed on the second hard drive, but when I try to boot to it, I get an error that the OS is not there.

Any ideas or suggestions?

From snarley25____________________

Take a different approach. I've found an inexpensive hardware method to boot multiple operating systems without using software boot loaders. Before you boot your PC you turn a rotary switch to select the OS you want to boot. I've been able to use 3 different operating systems on the same PC without fear of them interfering with each other. The catch: It only works if you have at least two SATA hard drives. (It will not work with IDE hard drives.) For details on how to build one of these switches, go to www.thesataswitch.com

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