Creating a boot drive; seeking advice on partitioning

[Jonathan183]

I started with the first couple of distros trying to keep the original grub and modify menu entries to add distros ... but after a couple of failed attempts and having to re-install grub anyway I changed the approach. Like I said installing grub from a live CD is simple anyway & the kernel update thing soon causes problems ... I think the current version of Ubuntu I have has about 4 kernel updates on the menu & manually updating those would be a real pain!

I have not done XP or Vista installs but have done lots of Win 3.11, 95, 98 and 2k installs I found 98 the easiest to install ... hopefully things have not got much worse. I don't think I will be buying XP or Vista any time soon so probably won't have the joy of installing them

Good luck !

[Artesia]

I just want to say... I've been at this for 4 solid hours now and I'm barely out the door. I'm seriously reconsidering how badly I want XP on this computer. Full rant to follow.

[jayd512]

Which part of the XP install is giving you the most trouble? While the installer is mind-numbingly slow for Windows, it really shouldn't give too many problems.

[Artesia]

The part where Windows doesn't recognize SATA drives unless you feed it a driver ON A FLOPPY during the install. Thank you, Windows, for sending me back into the stone age. Luckily I have a floppy drive, I found some diskettes that still mount, and I found the driver. But I'm having a helluva time creating a disk that the Win install likes. Most of my floppies were formatted with Macs and I can't get Parted to format them into anything besides Unallocated. I got one to work, and I even made it past the EULA in the install, then got stuck again when it said that that same floppy was bad.

Apparently there's a workaround where you tell BIOS to read the SATA drives as IDE, but I don't see any such setting in my BIOS, and I also wonder if I want to make that change even if I could because I don't know if/how that will affect me on the Linux partitions. The mobo is an ASUS A7N8X-E and I've never updated the BIOS. If I try and fail with a few more floppies, I'm going to look into those updates.

This format issue thing is so reminiscent of my recent iPod adventure it ain't even funny...

[Artesia]

Either I don't have a single good disk, or I'm not doing something right. It's silly that I'd get stuck because of a floppy. Am I actually going to have to go out and purchase disks? Do they even sell those anymore? Sheesh! lol