3 questions - more

[Nils Kassube]

thomas smith wrote:
> I am willing to get rid of Vista.  It can always be re-installed.  I
> do have the Vista disk.    I do have some e/m notes there but they
> are old and useless because I can't access them.  I was told that the
> way to get the password for Vista is to re-install it.  

If you have the Vista disk I would suggest you install Vista first and 
then install Ubuntu to a separate partition. Even if you don't intend to 
use it often it is a safe way to keep your Ubuntu version untouched by 
Vista in the future. If you install Ubuntu first, Vista may overwrite 
the Ubuntu boot manager and you will have to find out how to get to your 
Ubuntu system again or it may even overwrite the Ubuntu installation 
(depending on your Vista version).

> If I did
> re-install Vista
> would that wipe out the data (only my e/m) that I've created in this
> Ubuntu environment?   I could live with that if it happens.

> The most important thing is would installing Vista wipe out this old
> version of Ubuntu and the files (now only e/m)?

It depends on two things:

If you have Ubuntu installed within Vista you will lose all your data if 
you reinstall Vista.

If Ubuntu is on a separate partition you may be lucky and have your data 
preserved if Vista doesn't insist on using the entire disk, but that 
probably depends on your version of Vista. At least _some_ OEM versions 
of Windows XP and older would insist on wiping all existing data. I 
don't know about Vista though.

> Have not yet checked your list of links for reading but will Sunday. 
> I assume that these include information on installing Ubuntu first
> (or re-installing for the entire disk, wiping out what there now).

No, those links were for a version upgrade without reinstalling. If you 
want a fresh install, I would suggest you download the LiveCD from [1] 
and burn it as an ISO to a CD/DVD like it is described at [2] and make a 
backup of the data you want to preserve. Then boot with the CD and start 
the installation from within the live system. You can then somehow 
select to preserve your /home directory during the partitioning but I 
don't know about the details.

> By the way, I did select install on the entire disk and it did not
> work. After a couple of these I still ended up at the Windows boot
> manager screen and the only selection was the old version.

That's interesting but I have no idea what went wrong. Maybe someone 
else has an idea?

> My reason for trying the upgrade was due to instructions that stated
> I must go the in stages upgrade route to the next (8.xx) versions. 
> If I
> could skip the in between steps and go from 7.x to 9.x I would do so.
> I think doing so would reduce the chances of problems.

Going directly from 7.x to 9.04 isn't supported. You may be lucky that 
it works for you but it is quite likely that you will encounter problems 
which you can only solve if you are know quite well how the packaging 
system works. If you want to avoid several version upgrades with several 
downloads of several hundred MB of data, a fresh install is probably the 
best method.


Nils

[1] <http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download>
[2] <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto>