Breezy & WinXP dual boot on Dell Dimension 8400 (SATA RAID)

[Sean Hammond]

Hmm... okay.

Thanks for the help everyone.

I don't have any more blanks but I'll try to give the LiveCD a go first.

I'm a little suspicious as to why the Breezy installer did not offer to
resize the ntfs partition for me. If I can resize the partition in the
advacned partitioner (and that's an if)  then why would the guided
partitioner not offer to do it for me?

I am also a bit suspicious about these small utility partitions and ghost
images. I came across a machine once (don't remember if it was a Dell) that
had some sort of low-level disk monitor running below the OS level that
monitored for changes in the partitioning scheme each time before booting
Windows... I installed Fedora dual-boot, but when I tried to boot into
Windows it 'detected a change in my partitions' and refused to boot unless I
allowed it to 'restore the machine to factory settings.' I eventually
allowed it to do this, and it turned out the WinXP install was restored
(with user files) but GRUB was destroyed and the Linux partitions were all
corrupted (I tried reading them with Knoppix) destroying users files.

That was for a research group in Ottawa, their office machine is still
running Windows XP to this day because of that booby trap. We resolved that
the only way to dual-boot it would be to install a second hard drive.

But from ulist's experience with this same Dell system, it sounds like it
does not contain an active disk monitor of this sort and should be safe.

On 12/21/05, 'Forum Post <ulist at gs1.ubuntuforums.org> wrote:
>
>
> When I installed Hoary I had to change a couple of the settings in the
> BIOS to get it to install...under disk controllers, change the setting
> to the last option on the right (PATA).  I also had to set USB control
> to "OFF", in other words, to let the OS have control of the USB.  This
> is w/ the latest BIOS from Dell...AO7.  If you haven't updated to this
> version, you should.
>
>
>
> With Breezy, I changed my disk controllers back to Auto/confi/SATA (the
> same as w/ XP) and Breezy installed fine and has worked w/out a hitch.
>
>
>
>
> So, bottom line is you should be able to install Breezy w/o a glitch
> (try Live CD 1st to be sure) but keep in mind once the MBR gets
> overwritten you lose the ability to do the "Dell PC Restore" (Symantec
> image).
>
>
> --
> Emerzen
>
> --
> ubuntu-users mailing list
> ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
>



--
Sean's mailing list bin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20051221/630c86a9/attachment.html>