Messy installation (continued)

[Dave Dartnall]

Hi, Ubuntu enthusiasts,

Now that I am receiving list emails I'd like to follow up this problem 
which was previously being discussed off-list with list members Karl 
Goetz, Paul Schulz and Peter Garrett. Thanks again to Karl, Paul and Peter.

Recapping:

My system has 3 drives, with XP (2 partitions) on drive a, Mandriva 2006 
on drive b, and
a bit of a mess on drive c with a 23GB ext3 (hdc1) partition, a 1.9GB 
linux swap (hdc3)
partition, a 43GB empty partition and an 80GB XP (hdc5) partition.
The setup on drive c is the result of trying to install Ubuntu at the 
beginning of drive c
which was previously empty, and  having it take control of both drives, 
b and the start of c.

At this stage I gave up on Ubuntu and reinstalled Mandriva 2006 on b 
using the simple expedient of allowing it free access to the whole 
drive, one partition mounted as root. This has (I
assume) left it using the swap area on c which was there complement of 
the failed Ubuntu
installation. There is no swap partition on b.

I asked if it's possible to install Ubuntu on the ext3 area of c and 
leave the XP and Mandriva areas intact bearing in mind that Ubuntu uses 
grub and Mandriva uses lilo?

In response to a request from Peter, I sent him the following 
supplementary information:

The output from fdisk -l is:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 2919 23446836 b W95 FAT32
/dev/hda2 2920 4865 15631245 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 2920 4865 15631213+ b W95 FAT32

Disk /dev/hdb: 30.0 GB, 30020272128 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3649 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 1 3649 29310561 83 Linux

Disk /dev/hdc: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 * 1 3060 24579418+ 83 Linux
/dev/hdc2 8935 19457 84525997+ 5 Extended
/dev/hdc3 3061 3315 2048287+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hdc5 8935 19457 84525966 b W95 FAT32

Partition table entries are not in disk order

And df -h gives us:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb1 28G 4.1G 23G 16% /
/dev/hda1 23G 19G 3.7G 84% /mnt/win_c
/dev/hdc5 81G 8.5G 73G 11% /mnt/win_c2
/dev/hda5 15G 7.7G 7.3G 52% /mnt/win_d
/dev/hdd 93M 93M 0 100% /mnt/cdrom
/dev/hdc1 24G 1.8G 21G 8% /tmp/ubuntu

It was decided that I should try to modify lilo to get it to boot Ubuntu 
and this was partially successful in that the Ubuntu system on drive c1 
did boot but won't recognise any peripherals (printer, sound, adsl 
connection etc), and I gave up, believing that Ubuntu should be reinstalled.

So I'd like to have another go but stop before the MBR is modified to 
the grub boot - perhaps have the Ubuntu system boot from a floppy. I'd 
be happy with that!

Is this possible?

regards
Dave Dartnall