[DC LoCo] Booting Buntu

[Kevin Cole]

Walter <WHill22372 at aol.com> wrote:

> Hi:
>
>   I think I spoke with you at the Folk Festival in Takoma Park in
> September.  At any rate I have your card and Mackenzie's card.  I
> finally tried to use the Ubuntu disk I got at the festival.  I have a
> machine using XP.  I want to remove a file (Index.dat).  XP isn't
> letting me remove it in DOS (or whatever equivalent is).
>
>    Ubuntu isn't booting on the "d" drive.  I appear to be able to get it
> when put a bootable floppy in the "a" drive, but I cannot access the "c"
> drive (or rather the c drive has a new set of files on it), the latter
> drive has the file of interest.  Hmmm...could the old c drive now have a
> different name?
>
>   This post is longer than I planned.  Do you have any ideas?  The
> executable file in Ubuntu looks too long to copy to a floppy.

If I understand you correctly you are able to get Ubuntu to boot by using a
boot floppy that knows how to boot from the CD.  Correct?

If that is the situation, and you're booted up and looking at the Ubuntu
desktop, you're running in Live CD mode, where Ubuntu normally avoids
touching your hard disk.  It's a safety feature to make sure that while
you're just testing the waters you can feel reasonably secure in the
knowledge that Ubuntu won't damage anything.  However, you can tell it to
explicitly make your hard disk available to you.

Under the "Places" menu you should see an icon which is supposed to look
like a hard disk followed by a caption like "40 GB media" (where 40 is a
number I pulled out of my ... It could be any number.) There may be more
than one if you have multiple partitions or multiple physical hard disks.
Click it.  A window should open displaying the contents of the hard disk
partition in question. Also, the hard disk icon for the partition should
appear on the desktop.   Find the file you're looking to delete.  Delete it.

And, finally, very important: Close the window. RIGHT click on the hard
disk icon on the desktop and select Unmount from the pop-up menu that
appears.  The hard disk icon should disappear from the desktop.

Then using the red "power" icon in the upper right corner of the screen,
reboot your system.

(The clicking on the hard disk icon to open it used to open it in a read-
only mode where you were not allowed to add, delete or change anything.
You used to have an additional step to make the disk "writable". This
appears to have changed from the last time I did this...)

Hope that helps...