Well, over the course of the week I've been trying to get a dual-boot installation of Windows and Linux on my laptop that I'd be satisfied with. Long story short, I somehow wound up with around eight different partitions. Right now the drive boots up with Windows XP, but it's installed on the D drive/partition, and the C seems to have been used for Window's temporary installation files. There are numerous other partitions but I can't see them unless I look at them under Explorer, with an enclosure on my main computer. If I load up Partition Magic on my laptop (where the drive is being used), then it gives me an error and exits out. When I use the enclosure on my main computer, it shows up as "BAD." I've tried rewriting the MBR using the Windows XP recovery console, but that didn't seem to do anything. Does anyone have any suggestions? School starts tomorrow and I would like to have my laptop working soon.
In Windows. I don't have a floppy drive on either computer and I don't really feel like burning a CD unless I have to.
Windows install. Boot from CD, choose to erase all partitions. Create a xGB partition to be used for Windows, and leave the rest as unpartitioned. Make the XP partition bigger, as Linux can read from it and not vice versa. Once Windows is installed, install Linux onto the unpartitioned space using it's reccomended settings and a boot loader. You should have 3 partitions: 1 with Windows, 1 with Linux and 1 that's the Linux swap partition. Done.
^I just started a new installation of Windows. I think this will work but I'll post again if I have any more problems. Thanks for your help guys.
I strongly suggest you to have at least 2 NTFS partitions for Windows XP. One for system files and the other for your files. Then a third one (ReiserFS or ext3) for Linux. Notebook HD's can be a pain, and having two NTFS partitions, you can be safer, regarding your files.
Well, I tried installing Windows XP, but the installation was corrupted (I guess) at some point, so I just went with Vista. I hate it, but I may as well learn a "new" operating system. Thanks for the tip, Johnny, but I'm just going to stick with one NTFS partition since I'm mainly going to be using Linux anyway. The only reason I wanted a Windows partition is so I could have something with sound (Ubuntu is pretty bad with notebook sound cards) and so I could access the on-campus wireless, which apparently you have to jump through hoops to get it working with Linux. I've been using ext3 for Linux, as I read somewhere that it was superior than ext2 for whatever reason. I've never seen nor heard of ReiserFS...
I'll give it a shot. Vista crashed and burned on me, so I'm wondering if I somehow fucked up the hard drive.
I guess it's a moot point, since my laptop is not working at all now... It worked yesterday, and then when I go to turn it on today all I get is a blank screen. The CD drive indicator blinked a few times, but that's it. It's been in my backpack all day, and I've been walking around in 30-ish degree weather, but I really don't see how that could have damaged it.
Not at all. It's snowed here (I'm in the mountains), but the laptop has been very dry all day. The snow was not wet.
No problem. I never had problems with Ubuntu, regarding notebook sound cards. I have an old Toshiba Satellite (P2), and works perfect. Already installed on some other old notebooks as well, with no problems. Anyway, hope you can put it back working. As for ext3 differences from ext2, check here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3 As for ReiserFS and it's new version, Reiser4, check these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiser4 Anyway, i use ext3 as well.
I am just going to concentrate on selling this thing and getting an EeePc. That little thing would be far more useful to me as a student, and it looks so cool. I'll probably wind up installing eeeXubuntu on it and using my external notebook drive for storage. Edit: Apparently DOSBox runs a good bunch of games flawlessly on the EeePC. I'm sold a thousand times over.
Any update? I have to wait four more days before I even know if I can order one. The anticipation is killing me.
They look good, wouldn't mind a 8 gb one and sell my other computers. Just need to put my hard drives in caddies.
Yeah, I have a 120 gigabyte notebook drive in an enclosure, waiting to be used by my future Eee PC. I guess this has kind of migrated to the Off-topic section, though
